Managing plant used oil
Don Smolenski | TLT Machinery April 2019
Steps to ensure you have confidence in your off-site service provider.
Consider asking vendors for bids on a per-gallon sliding scale based on oil content of each plant’s used oil streams.
© Can Stock Photo / zhuzhu
Mid-career I transferred from General Motors Research to GM Worldwide Facilities Group (WFG). After two weeks at WFG, I was asked to lead GM’s used oil program—suddenly I was responsible for 18 million gallons of used oil (oily water) generated annually in the GM North American plants.
Talk about a deer in the headlights! Even though I had a bigger picture in mind, I had to focus first on what options were available for off-site treatment of used oil (I could not “constipate” the plants!). This entailed a thorough assessment of all possible off-site used oil service providers.
My first move was to call the wastewater treatment lead (call him Roger) at Willow Run, the largest GM used oil generator, to tell him that a headquarters guy was about to make a lot more work for him. It did not go particularly well, to say the least, but Roger at least acknowledged that I had been honest with him. Eventually I persuaded (OK, begged and pleaded) him to join my implementation team. Now aided by someone with extensive experience in site assessments, I started reviewing potential suppliers.
We first needed to investigate the staffing, facility capabilities, environmental records, etc., of potential suppliers. We sent a request for this information to several potential suppliers and conducted plant visits. This is where Roger became invaluable to me. He really understood used oil processing, containment, etc. I also was fortunate enough to secure the help of an experienced environmental engineer who showed me how to use the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the air and water emissions records of candidate companies.
This accomplished two things. I believe that it bought a little goodwill for GM when I explained to the regulators that GM only wanted to hire companies that played by the rules. It also sometimes resulted in additional insight from the authorities regarding a given candidate company. For instance, “they do a good job of meeting the regulations and working with us” as opposed to “they are a royal pain in the…and we constantly catch them cheating.” This whittled our list down to a few companies with which we were confident.
The next step was issuing a request for bid. The bid was to be a sliding scale per gallon based on oil content of each plant’s used oil stream(s). Transportation charges and any surcharges for “difficult streams” were incorporated. This simplified the review of bids and also ultimately made it easier to see the effect of any on-site plant efforts to their off-site costs. (On-site plant efforts will be the subject of another column.)
The end result of all this was that GM sourced only qualified, reputable suppliers. Since the suppliers were contractually required to provide this information, GM knew exactly how much oil/oily water was picked up at each plant; how much was water, oil and rag; and what the ultimate disposition of it was (e.g., used oil recycled into plant lubes or sold for fuel, water treated and discharged to sewer, etc.). We finally had our arms around the off-site disposal part of the used-oil equation.
Don Smolenski is president of his own consultancy, Strategic Management of Oil, LLC, in St. Clair Shores, Mich. You can reach him at donald.smolenski@gmail.com.