Filed under: Emerging Technologies, Etc.
Universal Lubricants’ (UL) recycled Eco Ultra motor oil is catching on slowly, but surely. Made in the U.S. at the company’s “re-refinery,” Eco Ultra is an American Petroleum Institute (API) certified engine oil with one of the highest percentages of recycled content, according to UL. Eco Ultra meets or exceeds the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) requirements and most vehicle manufacturers’ specifications.
Why use recycled motor oil? Well, according to John Wesley, chief executive officer of UL, “Using re-refined (or recycled) oil cuts fossil fuel use, lowers greenhouse gas emissions and reduces harmful environmental impacts on our Nation’s waterways. Recently, production of Eco Ultra motor oil hit a milestone of 1.5 million gallons. Now, UL aims to expand the use of Eco Ultra by branching out into the retail market. Soon, Valvoline’s NextGen recycled engine oil may compete with Eco Ultra for sales.
The U.S. produces approximately 1.3 billion gallons of used oil per year and only around 10 percent of that is re-refined. The rest is either improperly disposed of, burned as an industrial fuel or – get ready for this – converted to a gasoline-like fuel. Researchers at the University of Cambridge (UC) claim to have developed a process that uses microwaves to turn old motor oil into a gasoline-like fuel that can be used in conventional vehicles. They say the process has “excellent potential” for commercial use. Howard Chase, professor of biochemical engineering at UC, had this to say of the process:
Our results indicate that a microwave-heated process shows exceptional promise as a means for recycling problematic waste oil for use as fuel. The recovery of valuable oils using this process shows advantage over traditional processes for oil recycling and suggests excellent potential for scaling the process to the commercial level.
For reasons that seem obvious, UC is not willing to discuss the exact details behind its potential breakthrough process for converting old oil into usable fuel.
[Source: Universal Lubricants, Wired]
Eco Ultra recycled motor oil production hits 1.5M gallons; used oil can also be turned into gas originally appeared on Autoblog Green on Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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