Poor quality diesel rejected in Europe, exported to Africa

Major European oil companies and commodity traders are exploiting weak fuel standards in African countries to export highly polluting fuels that they could never sell at the pumps in Europe, according to a new report.

The Swiss commodity traders Trafigura and Vitol are among a number of companies accused of exporting what campaigners call “African quality” diesel, blending products in European facilities to create fuels with sulphur levels that are sometimes hundreds of times over European limits, according to a three-year research project by the Swiss NGO Public Eye.

When the fuel is burned, the sulphur is released into the atmosphere as sulphur dioxide and other compounds that are major contributors to respiratory diseases such as bronchitis and asthma.

Trafigura made headlines when a ship it had chartered dumped toxic waste in the Ivory Coast a decade ago, and the company’s lawyers attempted to gag the press from reporting on a draft report into the incident.

Vitol’s sales last year topped $270bn. Its chief executive, Ian Taylor, is a major Conservative donor, and this summer refused a knighthood.

Although not part of the report, according to data shared with the Guardian by Public Eye, the British oil company BP also shipped high-sulphur diesel to Ghana.

There is nothing illegal about the practice exposed by the report, and the blending of fuels to achieve particular specifications before export is standard industry practice. The companies involved all deny any wrongdoing and say they comply with the law in the countries in which they operate.

Public Eye, however, says the result is “regulatory arbitrage” that allows traders and fuel companies to dump cheap, dirty fuels by blending them into other diesel before export, maximising profits at the expense of Africans’ health. Erik Solheim, the director of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) called the practice unacceptable.

Last week, the World Bank said air pollution was among the biggest killers worldwide, costing developing countries billions of dollars in lost income. Vehicle emissions are a significant contributor to air pollution, which is why in Europe the maximum sulphur content of diesel has been set at 10 parts per million (ppm) since 2009.

In parts of Africa, the legal limit on sulphur in diesel is 5,000 ppm, although UNEP has been working to bring this down. The rapid growth of urban dwelling and car ownership in the developing world means that more Africans are exposed to high vehicle emissions.

The high-sulphur fuels also have a knock-on effect, rapidly destroying emission-reducing technologies in vehicles, according to Rob de Jong, the head of the UNEP transport programme. “So if you buy a vehicle that’s a couple of years old and import it into some of the African countries, the technology in there – sensors and filters – all gets spoilt, and these cars, which are potentially very clean, are destroyed in a couple of tanks, and for the next 20 years will be belching smoke. It’s important to understand the tragedy of this,” he said.

This in turn increases emissions of fine particulate matter, which can lodge deep in the lungs, causing cancers and other health problems.

Public Eye tested diesel sold at the pumps of outlets partly owned by various Swiss trading companies in eight countries across sub-Saharan Africa, and found that more than two thirds of the fuel they sampled had sulphur levels of more than 1,500ppm, 150 times the European limit.

Data shared with the Guardian shows that ships chartered by BP imported cargoes tested at more than 3,600 ppm in 2013, when the legal sulphur limit was still 5,000 ppm. In 2014, when the legal limit had been reduced to 3,000 ppm, BP shipments identified in the data registered sulphur content of 2,500 ppm.

For more on this story go to https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/sep/15/trafigura-vitol-bp-dump-dirty-diesel-africa-swiss-ngo-public-eye 

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