Infinite use of a finite resource
Virtually all industrial machines use oil as a lubricant. In fact, about 19 million tonnes of industrial lubricants are used globally every year. Producing all that lubricant oil requires large amounts of crude oil, and the extraction of that crude oil comes at a great environmental cost.
In addition, once extracted, the crude oil has to be shipped, refined, shipped again and then modified to fit its purpose – before even reaching distributors and end users.
What’s more, once the oil has been used and it reaches the end of its intended life as a lubricant, it needs to be disposed of. Today, only a small part of all that oil is recycled, often into base lube oil that is stripped of the additives added in the original modification process. The recycled base oil then, again, needs to be shipped, remodified and redistributed. In most cases, however, it is dumped or burnt as fuel oils.
In every step along their supply chain and lifecycle, industrial oils cause environmental impact and add to increased CO2 emissions – be it from the machinery involved in the extraction process, the engines burning gasoline while the oil is shipped from place to place or the burning of used oil.
But what if you could reuse all your industrial oil? Again, and again, without losing any of its original qualities? SKF RecondOil makes it possible.
With SKF RecondOil’s Double Separation Technology (DST), a complete recovery and reuse of industrial lubrication oil is possible. The technology enables continuous regeneration of the same lubrication oil, with all original properties intact.
SKF RecondOil enables a circular economy of oil, while greatly reducing environmental impact and CO2 emissions. Because when the same oil is reused, the need for extracting, refining, shipping and modifying crude oil, and dispose of it once contaminated, decreases. This means important savings, both for you and our natural environment.
Tomas Östberg
R&D Manager Chemistry
We are the climate smart solution
By using the same oil time and again we reduce CO2 emissions by up to 3 tonne of CO2 per recycled ton of oil each time it reused. This also means that the need for new oil to be drilled and produced is heavily reduced. Simple , smart and environmentally friendly!
Case study: Seven years without oil changes – and counting
The problem:
A Swedish steelmaker was faced with small particle contamination of their lubrication oil in a fine wire application. The contamination was affecting product quality and led to a need of frequent oil changes with high costs for oil purchase and disposal as well as downtime and production losses.
Attempts to purify the oil with conventional filtration methods failed due to the particles being smaller than a micron in size.
The solution:
The steelmaker installed an inline DST system on the production line. With the DST system installed, the roller oil could be continuously cleaned down to nano levels.
Around 4-5% of the oil in circulation was regenerated by the DST system at a time. And since the oil was regenerated at a higher rate than the contaminants built up, over time, this resulted in constantly super-clean oil in circulation in the application.
The results:
The company went from a 12-week oil-change cycle, to not having to replace the oil at all. To date, the steelmaker has:
- Avoided 30 oil changes – the same oil has been in circulation for seven years
- Increased productivity by 25% - due to constantly super-clean oil and avoided downtime
- Reduced the need to scrap products of inferior quality by 80%
- Doubled service life for the wire drawing dies
- Eliminated carbon emissions and environmental impact of extracting, shipping, modifying and disposing of around 90m3 of oil