100 years of greasing the wheels

While we celebrate the improvement in engine oils over the past century, it’s important to acknowledge the companion lubricant that plays an essential role: grease. After all, an expanded oil drain interval (ODI) doesn’t do much good if the regrease interval isn’t just helping maximize maintenance efficiency since the equipment will require maintenance and a halt in its productivity anyway. 

The complicating factor? Regrease intervals are significantly tougher to prove than ODIs.
 
A lot of the strategies we employ to improve oil performance simply won’t work for greases: sample analysis doesn’t work because grease remains static in place, so contaminants and degradation happen unevenly throughout the application, and any given portion of in-use product is unlikely to be representative of the whole. Other tests require up to a pound of the lubricant —– more than most components require to operate in the first place. “In many cases, the best way to test is to simply try it and see what happens to your component life,” says Mobil™ Grease Products Technical Advisor Toby Hlade, “and that is not a risk you want to take too often.”
 
This is where Mobil Delvac’s™ 100 years of experience with every facet of the industry comes into play. Multiple generations of lubricant experts have been addressing every challenge the industry throws their way, and they have the resources and know-how to accurately predict how a formulation will perform in any given circumstances. “There are experiences we can pull upon to say, hey, this product will be at least as good as these other lubricants — and provide compelling, data-driven evidence,” Hlade says.
 
One of the key challenges is synchronizing the grease with other maintenance routines.
 
“Getting the regrease interval to work with the ODI is always top of mind,” says Paul Cigala, Senior Application Engineer at ExxonMobil. “With one customer, we found they were going 60,000 miles on an oil drain. We were able to get it up to 90,000, but a key part of that was finding a grease that could get up to 45,000¹. That allows them to change the grease every time they change the oil and know that it was an economical choice — and it built in a very useful halfway check-in point in their preventative maintenance routine. Even if the oil doesn’t need changing, 45,000 miles is a great interval for checking the status of the rest of your components while you regrease.”
 
Because of the realities of grease development, the Mobil team’s global scale is also a huge advantage. “Making oil is analogous to making powdered lemonade,” Hlade explains, “your performance is 95% foundational formulating, and 5% determined by the manufacturing. It’s hard to screw up mixing powder into ice water. With grease, it’s more like baking a cake: your performance is determined 50% by the formula, and 50% by the manufacturing — because like with a cake, the process of putting everything together is as important as the actual ingredients.”
 
ExxonMobil engineers develop greases in-house, allowing the team to be intimately familiar with — or even involved in — the development process, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the product, its role, how it came to be, and its history and predecessors. Our strong, decades-old relationship with the OEMs doesn’t hurt either!
 
So even though the particulars of the product and how it’s used are different, Mobil greases ultimately stand out for the same reason Mobil oils do: because we have experience to develop the best products, the scale to support to provide the best support, and a team of the best engineers in the world making it all possible — greasing the wheels of industry, of history, and of the world.

¹ This example is based on the experience of a single customer. Actual results can vary depending upon the type of equipment used and its maintenance, operating conditions and environment, and any prior lubricant used.