SON Says Most Diesel on Sale Are Adulterated with Kerosene

In what appears to be a disturbing revelation, the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) has disclosed that virtually all the diesel on sale at the various filling stations in the country may be adulterated with kerosene and other substances.
SON made the declaration on the strength of a pilot testing exercise of petroleum products concluded recently, where the Federal Government agency sampled and tested products from 21 filling stations in Lagos. The degree of adulteration is considered frightening and of great concern.

In what appears to be a disturbing revelation, the Standards Organization of Nigeria (SON) has disclosed that virtually all the diesel on sale at the various filling stations in the country may be adulterated with kerosene and other substances.
SON made the declaration on the strength of a pilot testing exercise of petroleum products concluded recently, where the Federal Government agency sampled and tested products from 21 filling stations in Lagos. The degree of adulteration is considered frightening and of great concern.

The result of the exercise was released last week during a one-day stakeholders' sensitization forum on petroleum products marketing, organized by SON and targeted at improving service delivery in the sector that generates about 90 per cent of the nation's foreign exchange.
An official of SON, Mr. Timothy Abner, an engineer, who undertook the investigation, said the findings were startling, resulting in a preliminary conclusion that the entire diesel distributed across the country might be adulterated with kerosene.
"We sampled 21 filling stations, most of which were what you will refer to as front line stations and we discovered that while Premium Motor Spirit (PMS), commonly called petrol, was mostly of passable quality, the Automotive Gas Oil (AGO) commonly referred to as diesel, were highly adulterated, mostly with kerosene at alarming rates of contamination ranging from 15 per cent to 69 per cent," Abner said.
Abner stressed that the situation was precarious and signals grave danger to the industrial sector and other sectors of the economy which depend on these contaminated petroleum products as their major source of fuel to power their factories and plants.