Oil from natural gas?

Paul Hawker

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This new Pennzoil promotional clip says that the original fill for the Gen V's are a special oil made from Natural gas instead of crude oil.

http://www.youtube.com/user/pennzoil

Has an interview about it with Ralph and SRT racing drivers.

First I have heard about this new Natural Gas based engine oil.

Anybody know more details?
 
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Mopar488

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I used to be a supplier to oil field service companies that did fracking for natural gas in the in the VA, KY and WV areas prior to he bottom dropping out of natural gas pricing a couple of years ago. The business moved north and the Marcellus and Utica shales regions in WV, PA, NY and OH were using hydraulic fracking along with horizontal fracking for natural gas. About the same time, as natural gas prices were dropping, a lot of the OFS companies started to switch over to liquids until the natural gas pricing picked back up. They were going for oil. As far as how the process of getting motor oil from natural gas, you might want to google it, but most of the OFS I dealt with would do either one depending on where the market was at the time. There are illustrations that show levels when drilling of what you will hit at different depths, whether it is natural gas, oil, or methane.
 

Bryan Savage

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This sounds very cool, but I admit to not knowing much about it. We got any chemists here?

Compressing natural gas (CH4) to very high pressures (Compressed Natural Gas (CNG)) or low temperatures (Liquified Natural Gas (LNG)) doesn't change the composition of the methane compound.

Now, the carbon atom by itself is fairly electronegative (-4), and so there's plenty of space for other atoms to bond to it. Give a carbon atom four hydrogen atoms, and you have methane. If you can remove one of the hydrogen atoms and attach another carbon atom, you've begun a hydrocarbon chain. A bonded chain of up to four carbon atoms will remain gaseous, where as between five and twenty carbon atoms in a chain will be a liquid, and more than twenty will be a solid. Moar carbon=moar viscous.

So Royal Dutch Shell has found a way to knock hydrogen atoms off of carbon ones, chain somewhere between five and twenty (probably closer to 5-10, as 0W-40 oil isn't very thick) carbon atoms without letting them bond to themselves (forming a benzene ring molecule), add their colouring and special trademarked stuff, and package it as an engine oil. That is awesome.

The old way, of course, being to heat crude oil long enough to break the chemical bonds of the hydrocarbon chains and skim off the glop until you've got what you want. You can't possibly get 100% mix of the carbon chains you want, so they call the rest "impurities".

Likewise, with this new method, unless you're manipulating every compound one at a time, the new Pennzoil must have some longer chains and some shorter chains than what they want. Wouldn't those be impurities too?

None the less, if that's the oil that Ralph says my car needs, that's the oil it gets. It's only $9 a quart.

Sources:
Wikipedia (of course)
The Encyclopedia of Earth
Foster Learning
 

Bobpantax

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It seems to me that this process could result in some of our Southwestern members ( diet may be more conducive to gas production) capturing some of their own natural gas and sending it off to be processed to produce vanity oil for their Viper.
 

Runninfast89

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so the question is i guess would it be better for our engines? viper engine specifically?
 

Bryan Savage

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so the question is i guess would it be better for our engines? viper engine specifically?

Ultimately, I can only shrug. I am not a petroleum or API engineer. I can only spout what I read someplace else. I don't know from experience.

Before MY2013, SRT was all about the Mobil 1 0W-40 oil for their engines. The new engines were developed to satisfy this "MS-12633" oil standard. Apparently Pennzoil made the cut and Mobil didn't. Was that because Mobil wasn't able to? Or was it because they weren't asked? Or was there political or financial reasons behind it?

I have no idea.

I figure that the manufacturer knows better than I, so I will use what they recommend.

However, they cannot really require you to use this oil. But if you used something else and blew your engine, if they could prove it was your inferior choice of oil's fault, they won't pay for it. Seems like kind of a racket, but you got to pay to play, baby!!

Sources and reads:
Edmunds
Magnuson-Moss Wikipedia
 
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