Meanwhile, initial steps have already been taken to prepare for ILSAC GF-8. As our industry continues to support the ongoing production of more efficient internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles and a more environmentally friendly car parc, we anticipate continued advancement of engine oil performance.

For oil marketers, all of this means a continued evolution of their passenger car engine oils. Higher and higher performance is a necessity and delivering that performance efficiently and cost effectively has become increasingly challenging. In this article, we’ll explore some of the complicating factors in meeting both today’s and tomorrow’s performance demands and how greater additive versatility from the right supplier can help your company to deliver. 

Base Stocks: Navigating Availability, New Market Entrants and Maximizing Value

Looking toward 2025, the base oil landscape continues to be one of evolving challenge and opportunity. The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftereffects demonstrated how unforeseen global events can have lasting impacts on supply chains. Businesses everywhere are still feeling the ripple effects today, and other geopolitical shakeups in the intervening years have continued to add complexity to supply reliability.

For oil marketers, base oil availability and pricing have varied for these reasons, and access to the highest-quality options has not always been a guarantee. As far as GF-7 is concerned, this can pose a formulation challenge. The elevated performance of the new category—as well as OEM-specific specifications like GM’s dexos1, which demands even higher performance in certain areas—necessitates the use of high-quality raw materials, and lower-tier base stocks may not be adequate for formulating finished fluids to meet these elevated standards.

Simultaneously, new players have entered the base oils marketplace since the introduction of ILSAC GF-6 and have furthered some complexity when it comes to base oil procurement. While these new base stocks may not have certain credentials and approvals that help designate their suitability for formulation to industry standards, they can present a cost-optimized option for oil marketers. 

To remain as nimble as possible—and to take advantage of the optimal pricing and availability in what can be a volatile marketplace—oil marketers should seek out additive packages that can help them meet the performance parameters of GF-7 across a range of base stocks. What’s more, additives that can deliver desired performance at a consistent treat rate across different base oil slates can enable a streamlined approach to formulation that can help oil marketers maximize value with the base oils that are most readily available.

Versatility Across Viscosity Grades

Base oil variability isn’t the only formulation challenge that oil marketers must contend with when preparing their product portfolios to meet the new performance demands of GF-7. 

Like GF-6, GF-7 will in fact be split into two separate categories: GF-7A, which covers legacy viscosity grades 0W-20, 5W-20, 0W-30, 5W-30 and 10W-30, and GF-7B, which covers 0W-16, a lower viscosity that some OEMs have specified in new-model vehicles to drive even higher fuel economy benefits than the GF-7A category. 

Oil marketers must determine how to best structure their product tiers for a wide range of viscosity coverage. The additional performance demands of GF-7 will require oil marketers to ensure that their selection of additive technology provides broad viscosity grades. This will allow them to best streamline formulation while achieving proper licensing for multiple product lines, driving greater value via complexity reduction.

New Heights for All-Around Oil Performance

Though the marquee performance enhancement for GF-7 involves the lubricant’s ability to deliver fuel economy improvements, it’s not the only development. Products meeting the new specification must deliver greater all-around performance in a broad range of areas.

For example, comprehensive engine protection is a requirement. GF-7 will measure the lubricant’s ability to prevent low-speed pre-ignition (LSPI), an unpredictable and potentially catastrophic combustion event that specifically impacts gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines and their turbocharged counterparts (TGDI engines). GF-7 incorporates LSPI durability as an enhanced requirement over previous categories. Elsewhere, the specification demands the lubricant’s increased piston deposit control performance and its ability to prevent premature timing chain wear. 

While GF-7 raises the bar in these specific areas, the specification ultimately calls for enhancements across every critical performance metric, including the following:

• Deposit control
• LSPI durability
• Fuel economy
• Seal compatibility
• Wear and corrosion protection
• Catalyst compatibility

Selecting the Right Additives Solutions for GF-7

To ensure success in a new era of passenger car engine oils, it’s important for lubricants marketers to keep some key factors—formulation versatility and increased performance—top of mind when selecting the right additive solutions for their business.

An optimal additive package will, first and foremost, deliver the baseline performance required by GF-7 and provide it with an ability to differentiate as required. Ideally, that same additive package would have the flexibility and versatility to work across a broad range of base stocks and viscosity grades, eliminating the need for additional boosters. By eliminating the logistical and operational complexity involved, oil marketers have an opportunity to attain some significant cost savings. 

Finally, there are testing considerations to be made. The right partner should be able to help you from a technical perspective, aiding in the testing and evaluation of your product formulations in terms of base oil interchange and viscosity grade read-across. The right additive partner should also be able to help differentiate your brands for value gain.

Moving Forward

GF-7 raises the bar for what modern lubricants can contribute to today’s and tomorrow’s vehicles—and that is a positive thing for the lubricants industry as a whole. 

It is proof that we are collectively able to leverage new science to provide elevated performance and protection for not just new engine hardware but ICE vehicles of every age. Taken collectively across the vehicle parc throughout North America, these gains will be significant, benefitting our environment and our industry’s commitment to improved sustainability. 

Specification upgrades like GF-7 simultaneously offer an opportunity for our industry to capture new value in the marketplace. To do that, the right formulation approaches are required to both take advantage of available base stocks and to fully optimize your product offerings in the marketplace. At Lubrizol, our goal is to enable our oil marketer customers to do just that with a single high-performance additive solution for GF-7 that works across a wide range of base oils and viscosity grades, as well as flexible options to meet dexos1.

As GF-7’s first license date approaches, oil marketers have decisions to make. Working with the right partners can help you to deliver on the new performance requirements and to seize maximum value.  

Sarah Kipp is director of product management for engine oils for The Lubrizol Corporation.