Oil & Lube guys - translate this please

[widebody911]

This tickles my BS sensors:

Developed exclusively for BMW to meet the specifications of the new BMW Twin Power Turbo engine generation, they are manufactured, tested and approved to be the only oils worthy of The Ultimate Driving Machine.® BMW has taken the “crude” out of our engine oil, formulating its base oils purely from natural gas. The result: crystal clear base oils with virtually none of the impurities found in crude oil. It’s a major breakthrough in how engine oils are formulated, providing enhanced viscosity, reduced friction and lower volatility. They’re the best choice of oils to use for all BMWs.

[GH85Carrera]

That was certainly written by a salesman and not a scientist.

[sammyg2]

= long winded way of saying synthetic.

Most oils are refined through distillation.
Anyone who's take organic chemisty has all too painfully learned that there's always a mixture of different molecules. You can maximize some and minimize others, but the undesired molecular chains are still there. they are just in the minority.

That is, unless, you "grow" your own. i.e. synthetic.
Even then you'll end up with a small portion of odd-ball or errant molecules but they'd be very rare. IOW the oil will be as near a pure cut as you can get.

[9dreizig]

So Sammy, please enlighten us.. if synthetics aren't distilled how are they refined?

[Z-man]

Originally Posted by widebody911

BMW has taken the “crude” out of our engine oil, . [/i]

Um - no motor oil is crude oil. If you can find me a car that uses crude oil, I will buy it -- and not have to worry about all that oil refinery stuff...

-Z

[GH85Carrera]

FIRST-OF-ITS-KIND SYNTHETIC MOTOR OIL MADE FROM NATURAL GAS

This stuff?

[Bill Douglas]

Instead of super duper duper duper oils. Just use ordinary super duper stuff and change it more often. It's the contaminants that float around in solution in oils that do the wear. So change your oils and get the fine particle contaminants out.

[Nostril Cheese]

From the same guys who specified a 15,000 mile oil change interval and didnt bother to list the oil level quantity in the owner's manual. Hell, they don't even have a dipstick.

[Shifter]

So where does the hydrocracked oils fit in? Or is it just a refinement process?

[asphaltgambler]

........................so you know....... BMW branded oil is actually re-branded Castrol synthetic. It is good oil, but I prefer Mobile 1 spec equivalent ..........

[sammyg2]

Originally Posted by Z-man

Um - no motor oil is crude oil. If you can find me a car that uses crude oil, I will buy it -- and not have to worry about all that oil refinery stuff...

-Z

Most lubricating oils are based on parrafin or napthalene.
Which are components of crude oil.

So ya take the crude oil, clean the sand and salts and water and nitrogens out of it, and heat it up. Say 550 degrees.
Then stick it in a distillation tower. A big tall tower with condensing trays and pressure and temperature controls through reflux pumps etc.

And ya strip the light ends off the top, hydrgen, butanes, propanes, etc.

And ya take the heavy ends off the bottoms, the asphaltines, resins, tars.

And ya strip off the middle two cuts, straight run light gas oil and heavy gas oil, or ya could refine the cuts more iffn you wanted to and if your technology allowed.

Then ya refine those cuts some more in different process units, heating and distilling until the purity rises. And ya can run the same product through the same process more than once if you really need to get the purity up.
All the time tuning the process to optimize a certain type of desirable molecule while limiting the undesirable molecules.

Kinda like running moonshine therough the still over and over and over. The purity goes up as the impurities are distilled out.
Oh BTW, you'll never get all of them out. Every distillation run will contain a small percentage of impurities. You can still it all day long but there will still be some there.

Think Dichotomy paradox.

Eventually you get 99.99% of what you want, and call it good.


Or ........ you could devise a way to create specific molecules in a controlled environment like a lab, a way that could tightly control what types of molecules are created and which are not.
That could end up reaching a much higher level on purity that from refining.

But as has already been said, big hooey. What difference does it make?
Except in the size of the wallet i mean.


Hydrocracking us where you take long chain type molecules and you heat them up to about 900 degrees, and pressurize them to about 2000 psig, and inject them with hydrogen and send it all through a series of very large reactors (usually 3) that break or crack the longer molecule into shorter, more desirable molecules.

Like heavy gas oils into diesel or gasoline components.