The Drive for Lower Sulfur in Fuel

12 December 2008

LGC’s low sulfur certified reference materials are ready for New Year limits

For further information please contact uksales@lgcstandards.com or phone +44 208 943 8488

As part of a continuing, integrated strategy to reduce sulfur emissions, increasingly stringent legislation for sulfur content in fuels has been introduced in recent years. In 1993, European limits for sulfur in petrol and diesel fuels were 500 mg/kg and 2000 mg/kg respectively. By 1998 they had been lowered to 150mg/kg and 350 mg/kg, and again in 2005 to 50mg/kg for both fuels. In an effort to continually drive down the level of sulfur emissions, EC Directive 2003/17/EC stipulated that by 1 January 2005, petrol and diesel containing a maximum of 10 mg/kg of sulfur should be widely available on forecourts. The next stage of the Directive comes into force on 1 January 2009, when this 10 mg/kg limit becomes mandatory.

Enforcement of these new limits will require validated methods for measuring sulfur in fuels at the appropriate level. Laboratories validating their analytical methods will need to use CRMs to evaluate measurement bias and uncertainty of their standard procedures and to establish traceability of their measurement results. To meet the needs of testing laboratories in this field, a set of sulfur in fuel CRMs have been produced, which can be used by laboratories to develop and validate reliable analytical methods to measure sulfur in fuels at these increasingly low levels.

Particularly valuable in helping organisations to meet the testing requirements from 1 January 2009 will be the CRMs containing 8 mg/kg and 20 mg/kg sulfur in petrol, and 10 mg/kg sulfur in diesel. Developed by LGC and Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und -prüfung (BAM), these products offer the very highest quality and reliability.

For further information please contact uksales@lgcstandards.com or phone +44 208 943 8488