The company I worked for had as an asset the oldest refiner in the US. Our refining division provided a lot ofengineering support for them and produced a lot of their basestocks. Their Lube and Product Application labs were eventually merged into ours. I spent a significant amount of time over the years on basestocks and lube requirements and even more time working on the mass changes required for the Ultra Low Sulfur Diesel regulations imlemented by the EPA. I was actually attached for two years to the NPRA committee that did a nationwide impact study.
I mention this because the lubricant business was totally changed by this.
Sperm oil was originally prized as a lamp oil, not a lubricant. It was the cleanest, lightest burning oil available. With the advent of petroleum refining around the end of the civil war, kerosene quickly replaced sperm oil as a lamp oil due to an order of magnitude price difference coupled with good performance. It was still used as a lubricant due to it's cleanliness, low odor and it's ability to not gum. It was used primarily as a machine oil, much as we use 3in1 oil today.
Sperm oil has some unique qualities as a lubricant. It's two outstanding features were it's resistence to oxidation which gave it a long service life and it's low corrosiveness. what it didn't have was a lot of viscosity. It was a thin oil and didn't tend to thicken with age. The low viscosity made it not a good choice for high load bearing surfaces.
As the auto industry developed, it's critical role was found in automatic transmission fluid. The combination of low viscosity and stability made it ideal for the service life required. This came to an end in 1972 when the sale was totally outlawed in the US. The impact was pretty grim to the ATF market and transmission life.
By that time, sperm oil had been replaced in almost all other products by jojoba oil, which is very similar to sperm oil but is much better in high load applications. The priceof sperm oil had dropped over the years due to the advent of jojoba oil in other services.
The advent of ULSD had a double impact. Refiners were required to deslufurize diesel intensely to remove sulfur. The product diesel was not as good from a fuel standpoint due to cetane number and the removal of the sulfur greatly reduced its lubricant qualities to the engine, so the oils for those engines required much more quality.
After the Arab Oil Embargo, straight run lube stocks became difficult to obtain. The really good base stocks came from a few naturaly sweet crude oils such as Illinois basin(IBL), the Pennsylvania fields(Penn) and some of light sweet Lousiana crudes (LLS).
There was such a shotage of these crudesthat some of the major refiners built hydrocrackers to make artificial lube basestocks and desulfurize it at the same time. This was the advent of the entire Synthetic Lube market. The plants are very expensive and the lubes from them were marketed at high prices (even though they did it since it was cheaper than the natural basestocks). Enormous advertising budgets allowed them to market them at prices ridiculously high than natural oils.
The construction of the hydrocrackers for low sulfur diesel production allowed refiners all over the country to suddenly produce almost unlimited lube range stock that was easily separate from the rest of the Light Oil product. The operation of a hydrocracker could be adjusted minutely to tailor a product of almost any specification. Once this situation developed, natural basestock production essentially ceased. With all the extra hydrocracker capacity, the petroleum base stocks were routed to the fluid cat cracker units for gasoline productionwhere it is the most valuable feedstock production.
The result of all this is that almost any lubricant produced and sold in the US is synthetically produced. There are really no natural lubricants produced. The industry essentially makes every product to spec and tests each one in their aplication labs to fine tune the product. The bottom line is that about any modern lubricant is very close to any other in the same category and all will perform the same, varying only the with the additive packages used. They also tend to outperform the older natural lubricants. Look at the oil change intervals quoted now versus the 1980's and remember that the new engines require an order of magnitude higher performance from the oil versus the old engines.
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