News
28-Nov-2008 - LGC - helping the drive for lower sulfur in
fuel
LGC’s low sulfur certified reference materials are ready for
New Year limits
LGC’s low sulfur certified reference materials
(CRMs) are ready to meet the needs of fuel testing laboratories
when the new limits on sulfur in fuel come into force on 1 January
2009.
LGC, an international science-based company
and market leader in reference standards and analytical, forensic
and diagnostic services, offers a range of low sulfur CRMs,
developed in collaboration with Bundesanstalt für Materialforschung und
-prüfung (BAM). LGC and BAM were two of the founding partners
of the European Reference Materials
(ERM®) initiative.
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 Jan
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 BAM, these products offer the very highest quality and
reliability.
LGC’s Research & Technology Division,
based in Teddington in the UK, acts as the designated UK National Measurement Institute (NMI) for
Chemical and Biochemical measurement, and has a long history in
the development and validation of analytical methods and the
production of reference materials. LGC's Research & Technology
Division is accredited to ISO Guide 34 (General Requirements for
the competence of reference materials producers) for the production
of reference materials.
These low sulfur certified reference materials
are available from LGC Standards by email: askus@lgcstandards.com or tel:
+44 (0)20 8943 8480.
Notes to Editors