PDF《Chevron Phillips may add to Cedar》

40 JANUARY

2015 Rising Tides Lift PAO'

s Boat BY BORIS KAMCHEV Chevron Phillips may add to Cedar Bayou.

Chemtura'

s site in the Netherlands ExxonMobil'

s new PAO unit in Baytown H istorically, the 20th century'

s final decade was a boon for polyalphaolefins, a promising time for the synthetic base stock known as API Group IV . Demand for low-viscosity PAO was healthy, says an industry expert, and grew an average 5.5 percent a year from

1994 to 2000. Up until then, Group I mineral base oils had dominated engine oil and other lubricant formulations, and PAO occupied the premium niche. There was a little bit of Group II and Group III, Sandy Raid-Peters told ACI'

s European Base Oils &

Lubricants Summit in September. Then in

1996 large volumes of Group II came on the market, and at the end of the century the first Group III capacities were com- ing on stream. That'

s when PAO hit a major snag, he said, recounting the well-known story: In

1997 Castrol reformulated one of their engine oils that had been made with a PAO/ester-type formulation, replacing the PAO and ester with Group III base oil, related Reid-Peters, ExxonMobil Chemical'

s marketing tech- nical support engineer in Fawley, U.K. Rivals oil marketers (including Mobil 1) protested the switch and argued that it shouldn'

t be labeled synthetic. By the end of the 1990s, after much dis- cussion, the National Advertising Division [of the U.S. Council of Better Business Bureaus] decided that it was truthful to call Group III base oils syn- thetic, Reid-Peters went on. The ruling was not good for PAO. Manufacturers of top-tier engine oils drifted away from PAO to use Group III base oils in their products. From that moment on, the ratio of Group III base oil capacity versus low-viscosity PAOs increased dramatically. It doubled by 2000, was five-fold by 2005, and 11-fold by 2012, he said. Despite these circumstances, PAO demand has seen modest but contin- ued growth. Even today the question lingers: What is synthetic ― is it Group III, Group IV or Group V? Reid-Peters noted. Time moves on though, and new challenges narrowed the lubricant for- mulating window;

these include the ILSAC GF-5, ACEA

2012 and General Motors Dexos1 specifications, and lighter viscosity grades such as SAE 5W-

20 and 0W-20. Today'

s oils impose tough demands for energy savings, low- temperature fluidity and reduced volatility, giving PAO an edge, Reid- Peters showed. Formulators also learned to boost performance by using optimized treat rates of PAO, earning it a new spot in their toolkits. Engine oils are still thirsty for PAO, he declared. Significant impact came from the economic crisis in 2008, when smaller, fuel-efficient cars were much more in demand not because of lower emis- sions but of the cheaper ride in light of growing gasoline prices, Reid-Peters said at the ACI meeting, which was held in Alicante, Spain. Modern cars run on smaller but more powerful engines;

they work harder, run hotter and crank out more horse- power per cubic centimeter of displace- ment. The upshot: Less oil in the engine is doing more work under high- er temperatures and higher bearing pressure. All that puts great stress on the oil. ExxonMobil'

s latest forecast sees energy demand for transportation ris- ing

40 percent by 2040. Most of this growth is coming from the heavy-duty vehicle sector, which will grow by

70 percent, Reid-Peters said. A lot of that growth is going to be in the Asia-Pacific region. Over the same period the world'