What is synthetic motor oil made from? Isn’t it made from petroleum, just like regular motor oil? I don’t understand this.
Base stocks for synthetic oils can be made from petroleum or other sources.
I believe there are a number of ‘other sources’ but the one I can remember is the stuff that goes into natural gas.
Synthetic oil as a term is meaningless in the USA.
Long and short, in the last 10 years, motor oil makers have devised techniques to make motor oils from petroleum base that perform like synthetic oils. They market these oils as synthetics.
The downside is that these techniques are expensive and energy-intensive, so synthetic oil prices are not notably cheaper now, even for the synthetic oils with a petroleum base.
There was a disucssion on sythetic motor oils over here
The short of it is.
Synthetic means it made up of smaller chemical building blocks into a larger more optimised chemicals. The smaller building blocks for synthetic motor oils can come from refining petroleum or other sources. Polyalpaolefin (PAO) is made from ethylene which mainly comes from the refining crude oil process. Other building blocks of synthetic lubricants such as organic esters also may come from hydrocarbons and the refining process. (Organic esters do not come from the same place you get the free range eggs and non GM spinach, organic means it is made from hydrogen and carbon). These building blocks can be synthsised from non HC sources, it is possible to make PAO starting from an alcohol base, it is however rather expensive.
There are also some building blocks that can be used to make synthetic oils that do not derive from petroleum, Phosphate esters and polyaklene glycols and silicone based chemicals. That said methanol is used in the production of some of these, and the main source of methanol is from the production of natural gas.
PAO and Organic esters make up the majority of the synthetic motor oils.
With new refining methods, particlulary focused on stripping out the waxes and other undesirables, the conventional 'dino ’ lubricants are getting close in performance to the synthetics and the degree to which they have been modiified from the original petroleum is really blurring the line (as much as it ever existed) between synthetic and non synthetic.
NBC
Thank you, Mr. Slant and NaturalBlondChap.