International Developments

There have been two major trends in petrol and diesel fuel quality in the past few years. One is with regulations that specify fuels to support a reduction in harmful vehicle emissions. This is done through tighter specifications of some properties - such as petrol vapour pressure and density and distillation properties of diesel - and reductions in certain components, such as benzene, sulphur and olefins in petrol, and polyaromatic hydrocarbons in diesel.

The other trend is the promotion of sustainable fuels, mainly driven by awareness of the need to reduce both carbon dioxide emissions and reliance on mineral fuels. This has led to the need to develop incentives for the introduction of biofuels, and specifications for those biofuels.