We have a steam powered, tourist railroad in the Black Hills of South Dakota which runs from Hill City to Keystone. In October of 1998 when I had last ridden the Black Hills Central Railroad, they told us they were burning recycled motor oil in the fire boxes of their steam locomotives. Now I don’t know if the Black Hills Central is still burning recycled motor oil, but a friend of mine who has been practicing law out in the Black Hills for a long time seems to think that recycled motor oil contains some supposedly toxic contaminants and that the Envronmental Protection Agency would frown on burning recycled motor oil. Does anyone know something that I don’t know about this subject?? Thank you!
This link suggests that you can burn recycled oil safely under certain conditions, but not if it constitutes “hazardous waste”. It constitutes hazardous waste when it has been contaminated with other solvents and byproducts that require special incineration. This includes rags used to wipe up spills.
When I asked a year ago, I was told the 1880 Train is still using locally collected motor oil for fuel. I think the contamination deal is more of an issue for ground water, not if it is incinerated. One thing I’ve wondered about is the percentage that is synthetic oil. I only use Mobil One in my own vehicles. These synthetic oils are made from castor bean oil and don’t seem to burn. I’ve held a propane torch on the stuff and could not get it to burn.
If there are hydrocarbons in the synthetic lube, it is still combustible. It may take a lot of effort to ignite it (consider Bunker C or JP7) but it will burn.
I hesitate to mention anything that could risk of reignite the "“modern steam wars” but there is a company (actually it seems to be more of a group of hobbyists) trying to develop and market a type of engine called a “Tesla Turbine”(which apparently can operate both as a gas turbine as well as by steam) and one of the applications they suggest for it is as the power plant for Green Goat type hybrid locomotives. They propose burning waste oil, lubricants, solvents and the like as fuel. The proposal is short on detail (and IINM the only prototypes of the turbine built are small bench models) but see below:
We burn waste oil in our shop heaters. The oil has to be filtered and pre heated to burn. If set up corectly they burn much cleaner than the home oil heater. The bigest problem is ash. We need to have them cleaned twice a year.
UP burns used motor oil in both their steam engines now - but it comes from their own operations where they have some control over the quality. The one contaminate they specifically watch for is glycol based antifreeze which burns with a greenish color.
Being a diesel mechanic I can tell you other things besides waste oil are dumped in alot of waste oil tanks. As mentioned antifreeze, and if you have an engine problem the antifreeze gets in the oil, looks like chocolate milk when drained. Other things are brake fluid, cutting oil (for machining) , paint thinner, old/bad gasoline, diesel fuel, transformer oil, and grease to name some i’ve seen.
I would hope that the oil gets filtered in some way before its pumped into a tender to be burned as fuel. I also remember reading that ships burn alot of waste oil in their boilers.