When you speak of commodities, the price depends on volume and ease of transport. If you have 10,000 units one place, the value is higher than if you have the same amount in 10,000 places. The exact opposite of Coca Cola. And somebody with 1,000,000 units can beat your unit price, if you only have 10,000. With used oil, after you get past all the time and money spent on driving around collecting it, storing it, processing it, storing it again, packing it and finally delivering it, and ultimately selling it, there's nothing left in it for you.
I found this at
summary of which is,
Only 2.5 quarts of lube oil Basestock are produced from 42 gallons of crude oil (One barrel), is because there is very little relative demand for lube oil when compared to Gasoline or Diesel.
Not ALL of the crude oil can be converted into either Gasoline or Diesel. 100% of Crude Oil, cannot be cost effectively converted into 100% of any of the desirable "fractions" and therefore there will always be some percentage of the barrel that can be utilized ONLY for lube Basestock. Some of this undesirable stuff is heavy oil, from which ONLY lubricants can be economically made.
There is presently far more low-grade crude oil stock available than the world needs and this is perfect for making lube oil.
More and more of lube stock is available daily!
To make matters worse. As modern vehicles use LESS oil each year, and are driven more so they burn MORE fuel, but use LESS motor oil in the process.
The lube oil stock essentially becomes a worthless commodity, which becomes a nuisance to get rid off!
In the old days, if there was too much of an undesirable petroleum by-product left from the refinery stream, the oil was burned, or pumped back into abandoned oil wells. Either practice has however since about 1985 been illegal in the USA. To export unneeded motor oil Basestock to other countries for dumping is way too expensive, except if you are very close to MEXICO. A really BIG Oil Company like EXXON-MOBIL does not even consider motor oil Basestock to have any value. Their FINISHED Petroleum Motor Oil is sold almost for the cost of the packaging or the cost of transportation. They can and do beat every other motor oil in the market place that is of the SAME quality level in price, every time! That is reason why companies like "Pennzoil - Quaker State" spend over $47 million annually on advertising to promote their lube products and hope that consumers will buy their more expensive oil because they perceive it as "better".
Since production of Motor Oil from "recycled" Basestock is time consuming, expensive and not appreciated by consumers (used must worse quality), so far every business venture has collapsed or had to depend on heavy government financial subsidy.
Apparently the U.S. Post Office, which operates more vehicles in the USA than any other entity, must use Motor Oil made from Recycled Basestock for "at least" 20% of their vehicle needs. Because the "recycled" motor oil is so much more expensive, the "operating" costs for the U.S. Post Office fleet have doubled.
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"Pumping accounts for 20% of the world’s energy used by electric motors and 25-50% of the total electrical energy usage in certain industrial facilities."-DOE statistic (Note: Make that
99% for pipeline companies)
