{"id":456947,"date":"2026-09-01T15:35:00","date_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:05:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/zerodha.com\/z-connect\/?p=456947"},"modified":"2026-09-01T15:36:03","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T10:06:03","slug":"introducing-minimac-systems-oil-doesnt-wear-out-it-just-gets-dirty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/zerodha.com\/z-connect\/rainmatter\/introducing-minimac-systems-oil-doesnt-wear-out-it-just-gets-dirty","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Minimac Systems"},"content":{"rendered":"

We are happy to announce our investment in Minimac Systems, a Pune-based company that is building the circular economy for India’s industrial lubricants, one machine and one factory at a time.<\/span><\/p>\n

The oil nobody talks about<\/b><\/h2>\n

When we talk about India’s oil problem, we often mean fuel. But there is a second, quieter oil economy that keeps every factory, power plant, steel mill, and mine in the country running: lubricants. India is the world’s third-largest lubricant market, consuming over 5 million tonnes of lubricants and greases a year. Over the next five years, India alone is expected to add lubricant demand at a CAGR of 4-5%, accounting for a quarter of all global demand addition.<\/span><\/p>\n

Here is the uncomfortable part. Every lubricant starts with base oil, and over 60 percent of India’s base oil requirement is imported! An import bill that has crossed $2.7 billion a year. And once used, an estimated 85 percent of this oil is improperly disposed of. Roughly half of all lubricants end up in the environment, burned in the open or dumped, carrying benzene, lead, cadmium, and other toxins with them. A single litre of used oil can contaminate a million litres of fresh water.<\/span><\/p>\n

So we import the oil at great expense, use it briefly, and then pay for it again in polluted soil and water.<\/span><\/p>\n

Oil doesn’t wear out, it just gets dirty<\/b><\/h2>\n

The absurdity of this chain becomes clear when you look at what used oil actually is. About 90% of it is still base oil, the valuable part. What degrades are the additives, the sacrificial 5 to 10 percent that protect the oil the way white blood cells protect the body\u2014along with contaminants like metal particles, moisture, and soot that creep in during use.<\/span><\/p>\n

The oil itself is fine. It is just dirty. Clean it, and it works again. Processing used oil takes roughly a third of the energy needed to refine virgin oil from crude, and where 100 litres of crude yields barely a litre of virgin base oil, 100 litres of used oil can yield around 70 litres of re-refined base oil.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet most of India’s used oil never gets this second life. The re-refining industry here is fragmented and largely runs on the outdated acid-clay process, which produces low-quality output and mountains of hazardous sludge. The advanced technologies used globally barely exist in India, and most of the country’s existing re-refining capacity sits underutilised because organised collection of used oil simply does not happen.<\/span><\/p>\n

The cost of doing nothing shows up on factory floors, too. Industrial downtime costs India over $3 billion annually, and a large majority of it traces back to lubrication failures.<\/span><\/p>\n

What Minimac does<\/b><\/h2>\n

Minimac’s insight is that lubricant recycling should not require shipping oil to a distant plant. It should happen where the oil lives, inside the plant. The company has spent over a decade miniaturising industrial-grade lubricant recovery technology i.e. filtration, water separation, thin film evaporation, and more into equipment that works at the customer’s doorstep.<\/span><\/p>\n

Around this, they have built three progressive layers of circularity:<\/span><\/p>\n