answer:If your engine is burning oil “very quickly” then it is already in a lot of trouble. Your rings are shot at the very least, which is the reason that you’re burning oil. The darkness in the oil is an indication that combustion products (from the cylinders) are cycling back into the lubricating oil, and that’s not going to be doing any good for the rest of the oil cycle. That degrades the oil’s lubricating capability, and adds to the problems you already have. At some point when you drive with insufficient lubrication the engine will simply overheat too much and seize up. From that point until major repairs are done (if anyone should even perform them) the engine will never turn over again. (Most engines don’t, at that point, because repair is simply uneconomical then.) If you intend to keep the car and want the thing to run for very much longer then you should face up to the fact that the engine already needs significant work done. You may find that it’s already uneconomical to perform the required repairs to a car this old with an engine in this much trouble, and at that point it’s just a choice of continuing to drive as long as possible (bad mileage and excessive oil use be damned, and keep a case of oil in the trunk), or see what you can do about an immediate replacement. Normally “a ring job”, if that’s all that’s required, wouldn’t be a make-or-break decision with a car, but with a ‘99 Saturn you’ve got to consider the entire value of the car before you put another few hundred dollars into it. (I suspect more than that, because if you’ve let the car go that far in terms of the engine, then there are probably other major system problems – how are your brakes, for example?)