ABSTRACT
The original demands from the early refineries in the 1860s and 1870s were to maximize the production of kerosene as a cheap and more efficient source of light than that provided by whale oil. The primary method to produce chemically modified base oils is through the use of hydroprocessing. Chemically modified mineral oils have a higher concentration of saturated molecules as the hydroprocessing steps effectively maximize isoparaffins or cycloparaffins. The emergence of chemically modified mineral oils has had a positive impact on environmental properties and related applications. One of the new developments with chemically modified mineral oils is its application in the metalworking industry. Conventional base oil processing tries to separate the most desirable molecules from crude oil. The biodegradability performance of chemically modified mineral oils has been compared with polyalphaolefins and observed to provide equivalent performance for the same kinematic viscosity.
