Modern Problems of the Use of Petroleum Products in Agriculture

An analysis of current problems in the use of fuels and lubricants in the agro-industrial complex showed that issues of the quality of petroleum products remain a priority. Many foreign suppliers of well-known brands of oils have ceased cooperation with the Russian Federation in the last two years and have been replaced by oils that, according to manufacturers, are not inferior in their characteristics to the best world analogues. The monitoring of the basic properties of oils showed a significant part of the unreliability of such information. An important and growing problem of changing the properties of petroleum products, especially diesel fuel and gasoline, is their storage conditions. Monitoring the quality of diesel fuels stored in oil warehouses of agricultural enterprises has shown that the fractional composition, content of mechanical impurities and water in most cases exceeds permissible values. The long-standing problem of using leftover unseasonal fuel stored in farm oil depots remains unresolved. Agricultural production requires a modern express laboratory for quality control of commercial, purchased and used fuels and oils, which will help reduce the cost of repair and operation of tractors and combines by 25 - 30%, and extend the service life of expensive equipment by 20 - 25%. The use of compounds based on renewable raw materials as an alternative fuel in agricultural machinery poses certain problems. Some of the performance characteristics of biodiesel require improvement. Thus, compared to diesel fuel, it has approximately 10% higher density and approximately 1.5 times higher kinematic viscosity, lower compressibility coefficient and lower proportion of carbon in the molecule, has relatively low oxidative stability and a relatively high crystallization temperature, and also more hydrophilic. There are two main approaches to solving these problems: minimizing the shortcomings in the performance characteristics of modern types of biodiesel fuel through the use of mixed diesel fuels with a biocomponent content of up to 20% and obtaining biodiesel fuel with improved performance characteristics. Solutions have been proposed within each of these approaches. The use of used motor oils remains an important problem. The most significant results in obtaining secondary products from used oils were achieved in connection with the development of new methods for purifying used mineral and synthetic motor oils and their mixtures.