Our fuel and lubricant additives provide enhanced fuel economy performance, while delivering optimal wear protection to engine hardware. They are a critical enabler to minimise the impact of global transportation and power generation during the transition phase to a lower carbon future and will continue to play an important role in the coming decades.
As regulators the world over introduce ever tightening emissions regulations and OEMs make firm net-zero and sustainability commitments, there is a growing need for cleaner and greener vehicle technologies. This is driving hardware changes to meet the latest emissions regulations and a preference for lower-viscosity oils to achieve fuel economy improvements. We are collaborating closely with our value chain partners to develop solutions that will continue to help engines operate more efficiently, enabling improved fuel economy, emissions system protection and overall resource optimisation.
Engine lubricants degrade over time and the oil’s ability to provide adequate lubrication, reduced friction and heat dissipation is diminished. Our additives improve oxidation control and neutralise acids formed during combustion. This extends oil drain intervals, which reduces downtime and operating costs for vehicle owners and engine maintenance companies, means less oil gets used and reduces waste.
The fuel efficiency of a vehicle is affected by the efficiency of its powertrain, which transfers power from the engine and delivers it to the road surface, water or air. Our lubricant and driveline additives make powertrains more efficient, thereby enhancing the vehicle’s fuel economy performance. Our marine fuel additives also enable enhanced fuel economy, reduced fuel wastage and lower emissions output.
Our lubricant products are designed to reduce engine friction and improve wear protection, resulting in improved engine durability
and prolonged life. This helps to reduce waste and raw material consumption by keeping existing vehicles in operation for
longer and minimising hardware replacement.
With oil drain intervals continuing to lengthen, there's an additional need to ensure that oils can protect the engine throughout the lifetime of the vehicle.
Our additives also reduce wear in critical engine components, while our products help to extend the longevity of after treatment systems that remove or reduce the harmful by-products of engine combustion, especially particulate matter, hydrocarbons and nitrogen oxides, thereby reducing their impact on air quality.
Our fuel additives are formulated to enable refiners to incorporate more sustainable content into their fuels portfolio by mitigating cold flow and lubricity debits.
This gives our customers the flexibility to switch to alternative lower-carbon fuels, such as circular or renewable base oils, whilst meeting performance requirements for a wide-range of end-use applications.
In our lubricants range, in 2023, we commercialised a pioneering new lubricant additive package, Infineum P6895A. As well as meeting stringent performance standards, this new product was developed for deployment in base stocks derived from renewable sources.
We ensure that our products remain safe and compliant with global regulations. We provide safety, health, environmental and regulatory information on our products so that they can be handled safely by our colleagues, service providers, commercial partners and customers.
Going beyond legislative obligations and as part of responsible care of our products throughout their life-cycle, we also routinely screen for the presence of substances of concern (SOC). These are substances which are, or are likely to become, restricted or banned by regulatory action or face pressure for substitution, typically due to certain intrinsic hazard properties or risks of adverse effects to human health or the environment. All applications of SOCs are assessed to ensure their use is safe and, where possible, we seek
to substitute them for safer alternatives.
The European Union’s REACH (the Registration, Evaluation, Authorisation and restriction of Chemicals) regulation has
become the model for tighter control of chemical use. It has required many years of testing and assessment to complete all necessary substance registrations and ensure that our products can be used safely.
Since the end of the initial REACH registration phase in 2018, Infineum continues to invest significant resources in ensuring ongoing compliance with REACH as well as other chemical safety initiatives, including equivalent regulations in Korea, Taiwan and Turkey.
The products and components we develop are created with sustainability in mind and we are committed to integrating sustainability throughout our value chain, from the extraction of raw materials to the end-of-life treatment of our products.
This holistic approach is integrated into how we manage our product portfolios and enables our technologists and product formulators to systematically assess a potential product’s impact by taking sustainability criteria, risks and opportunities into consideration. We are continuing on track to meet our 2025 ambition of assessing 100% of new Infineum products against sustainability criteria.
In 2023, we completed our first portfolio sustainability assessment. The results of this assessment will be used to set improvement goals for the impacts of our products, make strategic decisions on technology investments, and ultimately help to bring new innovative products to the market.
We work closely with our suppliers, customers, and OEMs to improve the total impact profile of our products by looking for raw material substitutions that achieve the right balance of lower product carbon footprint, in-use performance and cost competitiveness.
For example, we are continuing to incorporate circular material in key products through the use of re-refined base oil (RRBO) as a diluent in components. Re-refining requires less energy than is needed for refining crude oil to produce base oil and it also means less non-renewable virgin oil is consumed.
This results in reduced waste and lower carbon footprint.
We are now focusing on controlling the cost of these initiatives to ensure that they are commercially viable, scalable and affordable to the end consumer. At the same time, we are developing chain of custody solutions that will enable us to pass on more value to our customers and help them to achieve their own sustainability objectives.
