SINGAPORE — The National Environment Agency (NEA) will further tighten fuel quality parameters and additives in petrol and diesel from July next year in an effort to safeguard public health.
The four additives to be subject to limits —
For example, methanol produces toxic substances such as formaldehyde, which as a carcinogen is harmful to human health.
Under the new regulation, the use of methanol in petrol must be capped at 3 per cent and MMT at 2mg per litre, while phosphorus will be banned. In diesel, FAME must be capped at 7 per cent and MMT at 2mg per litre.
While there are no products currently in the market that run afoul of the tightened limits, the new regulations are benchmarked against the European Union standards and are part of ongoing efforts to further improve Singapore’s ambient air quality by 2020, and safeguard public health, the NEA said.
Spokesmen from three of the four petrol companies here — Caltex, Esso and Shell — confirmed that their existing products already comply with the new regulatory standards. Singapore Petroleum Company did not respond to media queries.
In 2014, emission standards for diesel vehicles were tightened, while standards for petrol vehicles and motorcycle were revised in April this year to be in line with those that are in place in Europe and Japan.
Other measures include a new Vehicular Emissions Scheme to encourage motorists to buy environment-friendly vehicle models, which replaced the Carbon Emissions-Based Vehicle Scheme (CEVS) in Jan 1 this year.
In April, NEA also announced a plan to dole out cash incentives to encourage the deregistration of older motorcycles over the next five years, which the agency said would address the large contribution to air pollution by motorcycles.
Similar efforts are ongoing in Europe, such as an experiment in the United Kingdom to replace methanol produced from biofuels — which critics say takes up land and competes with food production — with fully renewable methanol produced using geothermal energy from Iceland.
Currently, no more than three per cent of methanol per litre of petrol is allowed in Europe, which is similar to the new limits that will be in place in Singapore.
~ above taken from TODAY 25 July 2016 by Victor Goh
CleanBoost Products are tested, certified and registered under the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in USA. And the EPA has long made it a requirement to adhere to the same standards the NEA in Singapore is about to implement.