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مجلة النفط والتعاون العربي
161
العدد
- 2017
أربعون
المجلد الثالث و ال
2016
أوابك العلمية لعام
�
ص لبحوث العلمية الفائزة بجائزة
�
عدد خا
26
16
Government support also came late and only in 1993 President Clinton signed
Executive Order instructing government agencies to preferentially procure re-
refined motor oil. The Federal Trade Commission ruled in 1995 “that motor oils
were to be labelled according to their meeting the tests of the API’s Engine Oil
Licensing and Certification System (EOLCS), and not based on whether they
were recycled or virgin.”
The problems in the US are compounded by the demand for low cost fuel
generated from used oil sources. This will remain a challenge to re-refiners
anywhere as it will set the level of used oil prices.
The utilization of used oil in North America is essentially driven by economics
of different disposal options. While the collection rates are comparable to those
of Europe, more than 80 percent of the collected used oil goes to various fuel
applications and about 12 percent is sent to re-refining
54
.
In Europe, it is said that Mineralöl-Raffinerie Dollbergen GmbH in Germany has
been re-refining used lubricants for more than 50 years
24
where it started its
activities by manufacturing and using simple dewatering systems for the
production of fuel oil. In Italy, the company Viscolube was founded in 1963 to
re-refine used oil
15
. They started with a distillation and clay treating process and
probably continue using this process in one plant in Italy now. However, they
switched in 2005 to hydro-treating after a combined effort with Axens of IFP
1
.
In 2008 the European Union ‘Waste Directive’ provided a new and formal
impetus to re-refiners as it favored this over the processing for fuel
20
. Europe
became the front runner of re-refining due to the strengthening of laws and
regulations in many countries
54
yet the volume of processing for fuel is very close
to the volume of processing for recovering base oils.
In Asia, the re-refining industry was slow to pick up steam due to the high
investment cost and the lower prices of re-refined oils compared to virgin oils
26
.
The lack of strong environmental regulations may have been a reason too. Yet in
mid-1960s there were more than 150 re-refiners mostly small size but with a total
combined capacity of 300 million gallons a year using mostly the acid clay
process with its attendant sub-standard products and its environmental hazard of
acid sludge and waste clay. In the 1970s, the Phillips PROP process was used
26
in Asia which is an improvement over acid clay but also had its own problem of
high investment cost and waste disposal of “heavy metal laden precipitate”
26
.