Leading lubricant associations in the United States and Europe have expressed concerns over an influential sustainability panel’s guidance on avoiding greenhouse gas emissions – guidance advising that emissions reductions enabled by lubricants not be recognized when those lubricants are made from petroleum.
A recent letter to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, written by the American Petroleum Institute and co-signed by organizations including UEIL (the Union of the European Lubricant Industry) and ATIEL (the Technical Association for the European Lubricant Industry) complains that the the council’s guidance would stifle innovation, undermine ongoing efficiency efforts and impact future research and development of lubricating oils and greases.
“When they attempt to regulate lubricants, they don’t really understand that the role of a lubricant is to create energy efficiency further on down the road,” UEIL President Mattia Adani told Lube Report. “They always look at the lubricant itself and how to make it more sustainable even at the risk of losing efficiency of the lubricated product.”
The Oct. 16 letter requests clarification for a section in the guidance that appears to include solutions “… not directly applied to activities involving exploration, extraction, mining and/or production, distribution and sales of fossil fuels ….” The industry’s interpretation is that any lubricant application directly connected to a fossil fuel is excluded from avoided emissions calculation. The example given is lubricating oil in conventional car running on gasoline.
“Without looking at the role or the purpose of the product – to enable machinery’s mobility in an efficient way – if you exclude or put limitations on molecules you might end up, rather than avoiding emissions, creating more emissions,” Adani said.
The letter goes on to argue that lubricants contribute to avoided emissions benefits by their very nature and point out that “even small improvements” in automotive formulations can have a large impact on greenhouse gas intensity by reducing wear and friction even in legacy fleets. Eliminating lubricants as emissions solutions for fossil-fuel applications could also be detrimental to further R&D that might further reduce emissions.
“The lubricant industry is in the business of energy efficiency since the beginning, and we want to contribute to find an equilibrium on our planet,” Adani said. “We are saying the simplest way to get to that equilibrium is to look at the entire life cycle of a product, not to focus something that’s bad just because it’s ideologically bad. In this case, carbon molecules that happened to be derived from oil.”
The council is a forum of corporate CEOs that produce guidelines and policies for sustainable development. While its influence is broadly considered positive, Greenpeace accuses it of stifling efforts to manage climate change and energy use since its inception.