Klean Industries used oil recycling and refining facility, showing distillation towers, processing equipment and the entrance sign.

VALIDATING TIRE PYROLYSIS OIL AS A FEEDSTOCK IN USED OIL RE-REFINING

Project Status:
Completed | Feasibility Study
Organizations Involved:
Klean Industries, Safety-Kleen
Services:
Design & Engineering, Due Diligence, Component Supply

The Challenge:

Tire pyrolysis oil has an established home as a fuel. The harder and more valuable question is whether it can move up the chain into the re-refining of used lubricants, where collected waste oil is restored into base oil that goes back into fresh motor oil. That is a tighter specification, a smaller circle of buyers, and a route almost no tire-derived producer has actually demonstrated. A supply chain also has to work before a buyer will commit, because an offtake that needs new trucking or new infrastructure is barely an offtake at all.

The Solution:

Klean ran sample testing that confirmed its Boardman tire pyrolysis oil meets the quality requirement for use as a co-feedstock in the re-refining of used motor oil, the step where Safety-Kleen restores collected oil into base oil for a second life. The confirmation came back positive, with the buyer aligned in principle and conditional only on the plant being built. What closed the logistics was already sitting at Boardman: rail access. The material could move straight off the KIB rail into a Safety-Kleen collection network served by rail in the same region, so the route was rail to rail with no new freight investment to invent.

The Outcome:

Klean established a third downstream home for tire pyrolysis oil, alongside fuel and carbon black feedstock, and this one points at the used oil market that already operates at national scale. The value case is not that the oil can be made, it is that the specification is cleared, the offtake route is conditionally accepted and the transport is already solved at the rail level. That is the difference between a producer pitching a material and a developer holding a validated route.

Why it matters:

This is a demonstration, not a promise. The testing was done, the buyer aligned, and the logistics worked out, and those three facts are what a producer actually needs before a re-refiner will take their oil seriously. Klean can run that same validation for any operator holding tire pyrolysis oil, so the next producer does not have to spend months proving a route that is already mapped.

Discuss Validating Your Tire Pyrolysis Oil for Re-Refining with Klean » GO.