[sustran] FW: CSE on 'intelligent adulteration'

[Paul Barter]

More on Delhi's fuel debate from CSE.  Apologies for the less than readable
formatting, which is how I received it.
Paul
----


What's new at the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE), New Delhi,
India? 

... Other items snipped ...


A message from the Editor:  

"INTELLIGENT" ADULTERATION 

It could be seen as the best tribute the government could pay our colleague
Anil Agarwal.  
At the hearing of the air pollution case in the Supreme Court when the
report on fuel  
adulteration done by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) was being
discussed,  
the counsel for the Union government, Mukul Rohtagi, thundered. "The report
should be  
rejected, because CSE is not a 'technical body'. Only Anil Agarwal had some
technical  
knowledge and now that he is not there, the organisation is not competent
anymore."  

Why do I call this a tribute? Because sitting in court, I realised that the
counsel was  
stooping so low because we had hurt his client, and hurt it hard. Anil would
have expected  
nothing less from us. Standing behind Rohatgi were two officials of the
Ministry of  
Petroleum and Natural Gas (MoPNG), Shivraj Singh and A P Ram - both
instrumental in the 
 ministry's efforts to derail the use of compressed natural gas (CNG) and to
push for diesel.  
We had been their bugbear for long and now their desperation was showing.  

This time the issue was adulteration. The court was concerned that gaseous
fuels - CNG or 
 LPG - were not accepted because these could not be adulterated, while
petrol or diesel  
could. The government denied this. Its affidavit maintained that "all
samples tested for  
adulteration in Delhi met the specifications laid down by the Bureau of
Indian Standards  
(BIS)" and that the government had "ensured that the right quality of auto
fuel was being  
dispensed in the city".  

CSE found otherwise. The court had asked the Environment Pollution
(Prevention and  
Control) Authority (EPCA) to conduct an independent investigation. EPCA, in
turn asked  
CSE. The report - based on surprise collections and testing of samples in
the same  
laboratory mentioned in the government's affidavit - found that over 28 per
cent of the  
samples failed to meet the specifications laid down by the BIS.  

But the investigations found much more alarming things. CSE purposely (and
quietly)  
adulterated diesel with kerosene. The laboratory passed the sample
adulterated with 20 per 
 cent kerosene. The sample with 10 per cent adulteration also passed. But
the sample with 
 15 per cent adulteration failed, in one parameter. Its sulphur level was
found to be high -  
understandable because sulphur content in kerosene is substantially higher
than the diesel  
being supplied to Delhi. But then why did the sample adulterated with 20 per
cent kerosene 
 pass? 

The report also found that sulphur levels in both diesel and petrol
astonishingly went down  
as the fuel travelled from the refinery, to the depot and then to the retail
outlet. At the  
refinery, in this case Mathura refinery, the sulphur levels ranged from 300
parts per million  
(ppm) to 400 ppm. But at Bijwasan - the depot where the pipeline brought the
oil from the  
refinery - the sulphur content dropped to 200-300 ppm and then at retail
outlet, further  
dropped to 100-300 ppm. Clearly, with no "desulphurisation" possible on
route, something  
else was happening.  

Could it be dilution with an adulterant? A definite possibility. The oil
industry had no clear  
and convincing explanation. But as the tests only need the fuel to meet the
standards - in  
this case 500 ppm of sulphur - not being able to explain does not matter. It
is legal, so what 
 if it could be adulterated. 

In fact, the fuel specifications made adulteration a legal business, we
found. The fuel  
specifications laid down by the BIS allow for a range wide enough to allow
for "intelligent"  
adulteration. Thus it is possible to adulterate carefully without violating
the specifications.  
My colleagues, who worked on this report, calculated to their horror that it
was possible to  
adulterate petrol with up to 20 per cent naphtha and still meet the BIS
specifications. And  
given the price difference, an outlet could earn a daily profit of Rs 32,000
if it substituted  
just 15 per cent naphtha in petrol.  

Then key parameters are not regulated - aromatics and olefins in petrol and
polycyclic  
hydrocarbons in diesel. So what if this makes detecting adulteration
impossible.  

In reality, we found nobody is serious about detecting adulteration. The
paraphernalia of  
tests and specifications have been laid down with the purpose of loosely
monitoring fuel  
quality, not to check adulteration. Not even in the expensive laboratories
specifically set up  
for this purpose. Why does this happen?  

We have large numbers of technically competent people who are responsible
for setting up  
this system. Did they not know that the system fails to do what it is
supposedly designed  
for?  

Is it simply that our bombastic scientific establishment has failed once
again, in finding  
solutions to things that affect us in our daily lives.  

Or is there more to this seeming lack of competence? Is there scientific
"intelligence"  
behind the business of "intelligent" adulteration? Incompetence or
corruption? Will we ever  
know for certain?  

- Sunita Narain 

(This article is also available online at  
http://www.cseindia.org/html/dte/dte20020331/dte_edit.htm ) 

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