Among the reveals during George Braly’s unleaded aviation gas forum here at Sun ‘n Fun Aerospace Expo yesterday was the announcement that UK-based Innospec, the only company in the world still producing the octane-enhancing tetraethyl lead (TEL) that goes into 100LL avgas, has announced it expects to discontinue production in the 2029-2030 time frame.
At first look, that might seem like a logical, but easily reversible, contingency business plan in response to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) drawing a hard deadline on leaded aviation gasoline at 2030. This far from the deadline, laying out contingency plans to discontinue manufacturing what will likely be banned in its largest market, certainly makes sense. If the deadline gets pushed again, simply reverse the decision.
But avgas expert Paul Millner, a long-time Chevron employee with a degree in biomedical engineering from the University of California, Davis, has some deeper insight. On a chance, informal meeting at Sun ‘n Fun after the forum, Millner suggested to AVweb that the plans to discontinue producing TEL might not be so easily reversed, after all.
He said he learned at Chevron that producing TEL is a highly corrosive operation and at a given point, the material of containers and other equipment that comes in contact with the chemicals corrodes to where it is too thin to be safe. Replacing all those production components might be just too expensive to risk continuing the program. So, irreversible fiscal decisions (rather than theoretical contingency plans), need to be made years ahead.
As a sidebar, TEL is still legal to use in automotive fuel in several other regions, worldwide, such as parts of Algeria, Iraq, Yemen, Myanmar, North Korea, and Afghanistan. But up against the U.S. avgas participation, small as it is, those markets pale in comparison.
