Rafe sits down with Peter Dufresne – Executive Vice President at EPT Clean Oil to discuss all things regarding varnish and varnish remediation.
How do ion exchange resin filters for oil differ from those for water? Ion exchange resin technology is not dissimilar from that used in the water industry – it is the application of the technology that differs. Notably oil filtration will require the use of virgin resins because regeneration is not cost-effective.
Rafe Britton: A lot of people would be familiar with resin media filtration, especially in the water treatment industry where it originated taking out contaminants. Many people will be familiar even with home water purification systems that remove hardness from the water. How exactly does it work in an oil system and what are the major differences?
Peter Dufresne: Well, the major differences are that in the water application, people don’t really care about precision to the same degree because they’re regenerating the ion exchange residence over and over and over and over again.
So even if it’s at 90% or 80% capacity, we don’t care because they’ll regenerate it to a hundred percent within the first week of operation and everything resets. But in the lubricant application, we are using virgin resins. We’re not regenerating them because it’s really not cost effective to do it at a local level.
I mean, it’s technically possible for like half a million dollars. You could build the regeneration plant to regenerate ion exchange resin mucin in lubricant applications, but it’s really not cost-effective at this point. Right? So the first major difference is quality because we’re using virgin product.