What difference does your engine oil make?

I went for a crash course in engine lubricants, and boy, did I get it—along with an education in global energy markets, alt fuels, engine and emissions technologies, testing protocols and coming standards. The thing is, they all go together. And the takeaway from an intense couple of days around a lot of people with “Dr.” on their name tags is that we certainly shouldn’t take engine oil for granted, and we’d be making a big mistake to treat it as a commodity.

The occasion was last week’s Shell Lubricants global media event, featuring presentations from company scientists and engineers, marketing folks who made sense of those charts and graphs, and translators handling Spanish, Chinese, German, and Russian to make sense of it all for the international press who gathered in San Antonio.

The classroom was the conference center at the impressive Southwest Research Institute (SwRI) complex. It’s one of the largest applied R&D facilities in the U.S., and between the Shell and SwRI staff on hand, you couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a PhD.

Recess was at the nearby 2015 Shell Rotella SuperRigs event where there were fewer scientists but plenty of folks who’ve earned doctorate-level educations on the road.

The highlights from in between include:

The long-lived CJ-4 engine oil standard is on its way out, making way for API Proposed Category 11 (PC-11), designed to provide improvements in oxidation stability, shear stability and aeration. There will be couple of variants when the standard comes out late next year or early 2017: PC-11A (likely to be called CK-4 when approved), which will be the replacement for CJ-4, and PC-11B (FA-4), lower viscosity or “thinner oils” formulated to work with newer engines and emerging technologies to maximize fuel efficiency. Shell’s handy explainer is here: WhatisPC11.com.