The STLE Compass, Released May 24, 2011
“In Search of: The Perfect Biodegradable Lubricant”: Continuing the Conversation Started in the June 2011 issue of TLT with Lou Honary, Professor and Director of the UNI-NABL Center in Waterloo, Iowa
KARA: Hello, I’m Kara Lemar. Welcome to the STLE Compass, brought to you by the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers. The STLE Compass is your convenient and reliable resource for the latest developments in the tribology community.
This is another episode of The STLE Compass and we will focus on biodegradable lubricants today. More specifically, we’ll use today to take a look at and extend the conversation started by Jean Van Rensselar’s article in the June issue of Tribology and Lubrication Technology, STLE’s technical magazine. The article, called “In Search of: The Perfect Biodegradable Lubricant,” presents an overview of the issue.
Biobased lubricants, which have previously been referred to as biodegradable or environmentally friendly, have over two decades of active development in the U.S. As the demand for petroleum continues to increase, the price parity increases for biobased and conventional lubricants. While some biobased lubricants continue to cost more than other products, the price for many lubricants and greases are approaching those of petroleum products.
Today’s interviewee has been working in this area for some time and contributed to the article in the June issue of TLT. Lou Honary is professor and founding director of the National Ag-Based Lubricants Center at the University of Northern Iowa. He founded the UNI-NABL Center in 2001 and since then over 30 commercial biobased lubricants and greases have their origins to the NABL research. Honary has 8 U.S. patents or joint patents with two more patents pending. His patents, among others, include the first soybean oil based tractor hydraulic oil, the first soybean oil based transformer oil, and the first biobased wood preservative. Honary has written an authoritative book on Biobased Lubricants and Greases which was published April 2011 by Wiley and Sons in the U.K. and he is a coeditor of a Special Journal on Biofuels for ASTM to be published in May. He has published numerous articles and several chapters for books on this subject and is often a speaker at national and international conferences on the subject of biobased lubes and greases. He serves on the board of directors of the National Lubricating Grease Institutes and is chairman of the joint working group for NLGI and European Lubricating Grease Institute (ELGI) on the performance of biobased greases. Honary was recently featured on the History Channels’ Modern Marvels for a new technology he co-invented that uses microwaves for manufacturing biobased greases. With UNI Research Foundation, in 2000 he formed a commercial biobased lubricants and grease manufacturing company that continues to market biobased lubricants and greases throughout the U.S.
Today, we will get an inside look into his current research, his view of the field, and his contribution to June’s issue of TLT.
KARA: Lou, welcome to the STLE Compass.
LOU: Good afternoon.
KARA: How are you doing?
LOU: I’m doing great.
KARA: So, can you tell us a little bit about yourself and your current research?
LOU: Since 1991, I’ve been involved in the research and development of biobased lubricants and later on, greases, initially from soybean oil and later from other crop oils as well. In 2000, we also, with the university research foundation, jointly formed a company that commercialized some of the products that had been developed at our research center, so my experience is both with research and development as well as with commercialization, so I hope I can make some contributions through this discussion here.
KARA: I’m sure. So, can you give us some background on how you approach the topic of biobased or biodegradable lubricants?
LOU: Yes. Our research center is very close to the John Deere facilities here in Waterloo, Cedar Falls, Iowa. And actually in one of my hydraulic classes, a student wrote a paper on biobased hydraulic oils, at the time called biodegradable or environmentally friendly hydraulic oils in 1991, and that kind of led me to think about possibly trying to make hydraulic oils from soybean oil because we have so much of it here in Iowa. At the time I got involved, soybean oil was basically kind of a byproduct of soybean production because they grew soybeans for meal for animal feed. So, the soybean growers were anxious to find new uses for their oil and when we offered to research the soybean hydraulic oil, they were excited and funded our first research and that just continued. Of course, the student who was in my class who had written a paper, later I learned was a member of a team at John Deere that was involved in developing their own biobased hydraulic oil, but they had developed it with canola oil, which is a Canadian oil. It was for use in certain parts of Europe, and John Deere worked for a long time to develop the project, and so I followed up and basically tried to do the same thing with soybean oil, which is not as good of an oil as canola and rapeseed oils are, and so we had our hands full to try and stabilize soybean oil in a way that could be used to make hydraulic oil. In 1998 we basically got a patent on the first ever tractor hydraulic fluid made of soybean oil and commercialized it through a farmer cooperative. Since then, we’ve taken some of the less demanding applications, because hydraulic is a very difficult, demanding application, because oil persists in the machine for many years, and so we began to work on products that I call lost-in-use type of lubricants, like chain-in-bar lubricants for chainsaws and greases for semi-trucks because all of that is washed with the rain into the roads. So, we were able to go after some of the low-hanging fruits, easier products to develop, and the rest is history. We have over 30 commercially viable products currently in the market that came from our research center. We have continued to modify and we are into second generation of greases and it’s just a very, very exciting field. And as the price of petroleum approaches and surpasses one hundred dollars a barrel, we feel that these biobased products have better and better chance of getting into the mainstream market.
KARA: I would say so. How do you view the biodegradable lubricant market? How do you see it?
LOU: As I said, normally, if you want to look at it economically, by the time you get to one hundred dollars a barrel for petroleum oil, although soybean oil prices go up along with petroleum because you have transportation, chemicals, fertilizers and so on, but one hundred dollars a barrel is a good rule of thumb for me, just ball-parking it, that it’s a place where some of the biobased products could be competitive with petroleum products. And if the price of petroleum products goes up to one hundred fifty a barrel, then, biobased products, provided that the price of soybean oil continue to go up, but not to the extent that petroleum products are going up, because they always trail a little bit, then I think that biobased products will have a great opportunity to fill a niche. Now, we don’t have a lot of vegetable oils, because we want to use it for food, but the excess oil that we have will be able to get into the biolubricant market in a very nice way. The size of the U.S. lubricant market is 2.5 billion gallons a year, according to the National Petrochemical Refiner’s Association’s annual reports, and even if you take one percent of 2.5 billion gallons, that pretty much consumes all the excess soybean oil that we have, if we want to also have some for food. So, I believe that as the price for petroleum continues to go up, and as our knowledge of the technology improves and the products that we have developed prove themselves in the field, the future looks appears to be very bright for biobased lubricants and greases.
KARA: So, as you are talking about the products and they are being improved, how would you define the perfect biodegradable or biobased lubricant?
LOU: When we say lubricant, lubricant is an all-encompassing product that includes metalworking fluids, metal cutting, straight oils or coolants, which are water emulsified, it includes greases, it includes engine oils, industrial oils, process oils and transfer mortars and so on. So, we really can’t give you one, simple definition. From the beginning, our approach has been to try to match the performance of the petroleum products with our biobased products and make sure that the price is not excessively over the petroleum oil prices because as much as we would like to believe that people would pay more for environmental benefits and so on, in reality, only in special cases where people are near the water or desperate for whatever reason that they need to have something environmentally friendly, the real market is going to look at performance and price. I think on performance, we’ve been able to meet the goal, and price is the primary issue. An ideal biobased lubricant is one that is equal and better in performance to petroleum products, but the cost is about the same or within a few percent over. Luckily for us, at this time, there are actually some products that have met those criteria and are currently making headway in the market.
KARA: What are some of the issues you address in the article that you might want to expand upon?
LOU: Well, the USDA labeling is a very, very good topic to talk about, because initially when we started, there was no talk of biobased and biobased labeling. Everyone talked about biodegradable. I remember going to ASTM meetings, the issue of biodegradability had become so confused and complicated and people spent a lot of time debating that, where we felt it’s not going to go anywhere. Luckily the USDA came up with this approach of referring to the biobased nature of the products rather than biodegradability. The goal was to try to use some of the biomass based materials as raw material for lubricants and ultimately to try to reduce our dependence on imported petroleum. And so, with that, when they began to talk about biobased, things became a lot easier because the goal is not to necessarily be a biodegradable product, but to include a certain amount of renewable material in your finished product. Initially, the USDA wanted to do fifty one percent or more of the product to be renewable to be considered biobased, but then, the conventional wisdom was that if you try to do that, since we’re at the beginning of this technology, some products may not be able to do it and be at a lower percentage than fifty one percent, so we thought it would be better to try and to have products that have a certain amount of biobased content. For example, an engine oil may have only five or ten percent biobased content, well that would be better than having zero percent biobased content. On that logic then, the USDA began to look at products that were on the market. Let’s say we had sent some hydraulic oils, and since the average was about forty eight percent renewable materials in it, they picked the forty eight percent as being the minimal required biobased content in order to be able to label that a biobased product. I think that was a very, very good approach. It has helped get the products labeled as biobased, and then of course, there are rules and regulations or requirements for the federal purchasers who would have to buy biobased products when they are available and when they meet the specifications of the equipment manufacturers. The one concern I have about the biobased labeling, is that it really just works on the biobased content and the life cycle analysis that is done on the product, it leaves the performance aspect up to the manufacturers. This is fine, except that I know there are products that may not be up to par, especially early on, when you have failures, it really gives the industry a black eye. So that area still needs to be strengthened. At this time, I guess the performance is not part of it, it’s just the biobased content and the life cycle report that would qualify the product for biobased labeling, and hopefully in the future, we’ll add some elements of performance to it as well.
KARA: When you talk about content and life cycle, are there different grades within that or is there just a blanket – it meets a certain requirement and then its biobased.
LOU: Yes. It meets a certain requirement and then its biobased.
KARA: You started talking about, well, the labeling isn’t quite there yet, or it might need more refining, and that happens when you’re starting to establish a program. What are some of the difficulties or challenges that you’ve faced when you’re researching or talking about the topic?
LOU: Today, my biggest concern has been about the general lack of knowledge by the industry, especially the petroleum lubricant industry about biobased lubricants. This lack of knowledge goes from not knowing these products exist and can meet their requirements to having misconceptions about the evaluation of these products. Basically, our friends in the petroleum industry just say, okay, if we test our petroleum products with this machine, we should be able to use the same machines to test our biobased products as well. And that has created some difficultly because biobased products are a different base oil. In many cases, they require a different method of evaluation. I always give the example that we took seven base oils that in our machines, which are designed to test food products and vegetable oils, one was at the lowest end of the scale at about seven hours of stability, the other was at the highest level of the scale, which was at five hundred hours of stability, which is the capability of the machine, and we sent them all to an independent laboratory to be tested in a test that is commonly used by the petroleum industry for evaluating the oxidation stability of the petroleum oils. Well, all seven of them came back with the same number. We’ve got something, with a range of seven hours to over five hundred hours, and the petroleum machine, a machine that’s designed to test petroleum products, the whole thing came back exactly the same. So, that tells me that that particular instrument that is good and useful for testing petroleum oils is not useful in differentiating between a good and a bad biobased oil. So, our challenge has been to try and educate an industry that just because our product did not meet or pass a particular test in a machine that was designed to test petroleum oils, doesn’t mean that the product is not going to perform in the field. So, we need to look at other test methods. We are making progress to come up with additional test methods that are more suitable for testing biobased oils and later on, finished products. Once we get that, hopefully that will create a much more level playing field for these products. And I think, as I said, the general lack of knowledge about these products is just amazing. Of course, I’ve been in this industry for about twenty years and I expect everyone to know about it. But as you move away from the middle of the United States, people don’t even know what soybean oil is, and as you go farther away, they don’t know what biobased is, and so it’s been challenging, but I think time is on our side. Because of the success or usage of biobased fuels, there’s a lot more awareness of biobased materials and of course, in general, it seems to be more accepted that we need to find some alternatives to our petroleum use to at least reduce a certain amount of petroleum. As I said, it’s not going to be a large volume, but any little bite we can take out of our need for imported petroleum, I think would be helpful in the future. These bio-products, in time, will help reduce some of that dependence on imported petroleum.
KARA: What are some of the advantages to using biobased, you talked about challenges previously, so can you talk a little more about advantages?
LOU: Sure. In terms of advantages, biobased oils, let’s just look at edible soybean oil, canola, rapeseed, or sunflower oil; naturally they are very good lubricants. Because of their polarity, they adhere to metal surfaces very good, they provide very good thin film strength, they won’t allow a lot of metal to metal contact under very heavy loads, their volatility is very low, so they don’t have a lot of volatiles, their flash and fire point is very high, and overall they have a more stable body as the temperature goes up and down, within a limit, so that’s their viscosity index. As a result, these products could definitely perform excellent in terms of protecting the equipment, reducing friction, you can use a thinner vegetable oil that would replace a thicker petroleum oil, and still would do a good job, all of those are very good, with the exception of two major issues with biobased lubricants. One is, if you don’t know what you’re doing, or if you don’t refine the product, the oxidation stability is not very good, and that means exposed to the metals and oxygen and environment within the machine, they begin to oxidize, thicken up and eventually they could gel up over a long period of time. As a result, they require a much more stringent oil change interval and a good maintenance program. You can’t just put it in a machine and forget about it. And so, that’s one. The second problem would be that they freeze at a higher temperature than petroleum oils. Those two make the product more expensive when you have to use chemical performance enhancing additives to make them withstand the long oil change intervals, or withstand the high temperatures and not freeze at a cold temperature. So, when we want to have a product that will persist in the machine, like gear oil in the differential of a car, which will go for many, many years, then you have to put a lot of additives and the cost of the product goes up much higher than petroleum products, maybe twice, sometimes three times. But there are a lot of applications where the product is not exposed or is not within the machine for a long period of time. Let’s just take as an example, greases used on semi-trucks. You take the truck every fifteen thousand miles into a truck station, they grease all the bearings and drive shaft, grease on the fifth wheel where the trailer is hitched, and as the driver drives in warmer weather, the grease melts and part of it just falls off, then you have rain and it washes, and most of the grease ends up being on the roads. The next time they go for greasing or change a trailer, they have to use more grease. Well, that’s a fantastic application for biobased greases. You’re getting a better product, it has better lubricity, it doesn’t thin down as much, and if it does wash out into the environment, it won’t damage the environment. We have had the biggest success in the railroad industry, where ten million pounds of grease is applied to the tracks around the curves to reduce noise and friction from the wheel flange to the track. That’s another fantastic application because the grease is applied, it’s used once or the rain washes it off or it dries out and the train comes the next time, it’s regreased, and the grease is used rather quickly, it’s not persisting in the machinery for a long time, those are applications where biobased products have shown success and I think they’re going to grow from that area. The most important thing that I have observed on these products, is when you talk about rail curve grease, when we started putting some rail curve greases out into the market, the price of petroleum grease was about $1.20 USD a pound cheaper than the price of equivalent biobased grease. Today the price of petroleum grease for the same application is $1.00 a pound more than the same product in biobased, and the biobased product will also not harm the environment. So, we have seen some serious change in terms of the price parity. And as I said in applications where the product does not persist in the machine, biobased products will do rather well. The same thing will go for food grade products, where the product can come in contact with food incidentally or otherwise and these products are indoors, so you don’t have to worry about cold temperature issues, and as a result you don’t have to use a lot of performance enhancing additives, and the food grade products can be made with biobased oils and because of the price of petroleum base food grade products either grease or hydraulic oils are much more expensive than non-food-grade products, biobased products can easily compete and do a great job. So there are applications where the performance is equal and better and the price is about the same. I think that’s how we are going to get into this market. As long as people know they get the performance and they don’t have to pay much over what they are currently paying, that’s a free market. I think that’s going to be the start of the success of these products into the wider market.
KARA: Have there been any major developments that you know of or you could tell us a bit about?
LOU: Sure. Well, as I said we’ve got over thirty commercial products in the market. We came up with the first ever tractor hydraulic fluid, the first ever transformer oil made of soybean oil, which we sold to a company that’s currently marketing that. We had wood preservative made of soybean oil. But because engine oil seems to be the holy grail of lubricants for everyone, everyone is trying to come up with a biobased engine oil. Of course, this environment is a very demanding environment because you have high temperature under the pistons within the cylinders, you’ve got blow-by gases, you’ve got all sorts of very unhealthy environment for vegetable oils. We’ve come up with a technology called a continuous oil recycling system, which is basically the vegetable oil is placed inside the engine, but it doesn’t last there in the engine for a long time. Normally you have the engine oil in a car or truck engine for ten or fifteen thousand miles. The oils that we put in are primarily vegetable oils, but then they have some additives in them, very basic required additives, but we have sensors that monitor the oil. As the oil begins to oxidize, the system steals some of the oil out of the crankcase and burns it into the fuel line of the engine. This is for a diesel engine. Since the oil burns at very small percentages, it basically makes the fuel to become like biofuel, like a biodiesel. This technology requires to have a separate oil tank next to the fuel tank, so as you feed the fuel into the fuel system, you also have a fresh tank of oil that feeds fresh oil into the crankcase, but it’s done when the engine is warmed up, when the engine can receive the oil and it ranges from very small percentages up to two or three percent. That technology has gone through the lab testing and now it’s going to go to field testing. We’re very excited about it. It was actually a cover story in the May issue 2010 in the OEM Off Highway magazine. We hope to start this with stationary diesel engines, like the ones used by utility companies as backups, or the ones that are used in shipyards, or very large diesel engines that are on the ships or in the shipyards.
KARA: Certainly. And so we’ll look for more on that in the future. You mentioned larger picture or larger scale. So what would you say are the conclusions that you would want listeners to take away from today’s discussion given all that we’ve talked about?
LOU: I think the conclusion is that biobased products are certainly – luckily for us, we’ve had twenty years of research, development and commercialization. We’re not the only ones, there are several other groups, the Soybean Association and other farm groups have been promoting these, so the products have gone through some rather good development and there are some products that are extremely good in terms of performance, they are priced competitively with petroleum products, so my personal observation is that the biobased lubricant and grease industry will start growing from specialized areas as I’ve talked about, let’s say the railroads, the food grade areas, the truck industry and so on, and eventually we’ll grow into replacing some of the process oils and eventually the engine oils for whatever engine we have in five, ten, fifteen years down the road, especially in the diesel engine area. So, at this time, I think the future looks very bright for biobased products. As the demand for petroleum increases, biobased products are easily going to move in and start taking little specialized areas and grow and grow and grow.
KARA: Certainly. And all of that research, all of this has been leading up to this point, so this is a very good time to be doing research, you’re very lucky, and we thank you so much for doing your work, doing what you’ve been doing.
LOU: It’s been a passion, and I’ve been enjoying it. Lucky for me, I have a large number of staff members, students and researchers who are also enthusiastic about this. And thankfully, after all these years, it seems like our time has come. People are very interested in what we are doing.
KARA: Thank you Lou for joining us today and for your insight. I’m Kara Lemar. For more news, information and research on biobased, biodegradable, or environmentally friendly lubricants, please visit our website, stle.org. You can also get more on Lou and his work at: www.uni.edu/nabl or www.elmusa.com. Thank you for joining us today. This has been another episode of The STLE Compass, pointing you in the right direction.

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