Wheels Investigation: Australia's petrol is one of the dirtiest in the world

[PranK]

AUSTRALIA now has the distinction of having one of the dirtiest fuel standards in the developed world.

Amongst signatories to the OECD – an international economic forum of 35 countries – Australia has the worst record on fuel quality.

Mexico, once ridiculed as the only developed OECD member with fuel quality that fell lower than Australia’s, has recently introduced a 50 parts per million level of sulphur – used as a measure of how polluting petrol can be – in unleaded fuel.

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[niZmO_Man]

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Our refiners baulk at the hundreds of millions of dollars it will cost to upgrade their facilities to produce lower-sulphur fuel

Eh? I thought they closed down all the refineries in Australia already.

[GTofuS-T]

This is classic environmental science where if one person increases the standard, all of a sudden everyone else below that standard is the devil.

There's no science behind why a particular number is used (i.e. analysis of toxicity, overall emissions, actually air quality in dense areas), and often times it's most likely (as has been the case in underground mining diesel particulate levels) the ability to measure, i.e. when sulphur can be measured to 1ppm, or 0.001ppm, then that will be the new acceptable level.

The article doesn't seem to talk about other emissions systems such as Cat Converters, which when you look at Mexico, umm yeah nah don't need one of those.

[Humbla]

Cat's ay ,well there ya go. 

[Birds]

E85...unaffected?