Blendtek: Witham’s Ultrasound Blending Innovation Heads Into Europe

Throughout the world, lubricant manufacturing is typically a very high energy use, high cost and time restrictive process. Base oils and additives are often heated to various temperatures and “blended” to form the different specification and viscosity types of lubricant products for engine oils, hydraulic oils, gear oils, brake fluids, transmission oils, and industrial oils and grease products.

The necessity to improve both the time, cost, and environmental impact of the lubricant manufacturing industry, has driven Witham Group to develop and employ an innovative new process… You may have already heard about, our unique method for blending lubricants using ultrasound. “Blendtek”, as the process is called, removes the need for base oils and additives being heated at all, therefore eliminating the use of traditional gas and or oil fired boilers for heat energy.

As manufacturers of a huge range of different lubricants, this new technique enables us to blend thousands of tonnes of products using energy from solar panels and a simple 13amp plug, saving time, energy and drastically reducing our carbon footprint. To blend a simple 10 tonne batch of oil product now takes less than 20 minutes, whereas previously the same batch would have taken 3 to 4 hours to complete in total.

To evaluate the savings to the environment, we have saved over 20k tonnes of carbon emissions since using the process and heated the equivalent of over 110 homes in the UK for a year. Our gas consumption has been reduced by just under 80% and now in 2021, we are sharing these results and our story of the new ultrasound way of blending with the lubricant industry. We continue to expand the use of the Blendtek technology within our business.

“This exciting breakthrough is all about changing the environmental impact of lubricant manufacturing in the first place”

says Nigel R Bottom – Group Managing Director.

“So many environmental schemes and businesses look to offset their impact by using “carbon dumps or sinks”, and other environmental and climate protection projects. We have instead, come up with a way that prevents the creation of high energy use in the first place.”

We are immensely proud of this manufacturing innovation, and we believe we are the first company in the world to blend in a carbon neutral process. We are determined to help other blenders improve their own sustainability profiles and improve the oil industry’s reputation with substantial impact.

This new ground-breaking process has been tried and tested by the largest technology providers in the world, independently audited and reviewed, and is fully approved for use.

On the 25th of May, Blendtek was also invited to speak at the very first UKLA Sustainability Conference to showcase our technology. This was a prestigious invitation, and we were on a panel with the global corporations Lubrizol & Chevron.

The latest exciting news is that Blendtek have been also invited to speak at the UEIL Congress in Athens in October.

This is the flagship event for the European lubricants industry and a chance for us to bring our technology to a much wider audience and hopefully contribute to a greener lubricants industry for the future.

For more information about Blendtek, please visit the Blendtek website.