Proceedings of the Concawe Workshop for an Analytical Technology Exchange to meet Health & Environmental Regulatory Challenges for UVCBs

Report Nº 5/24: These proceedings are a record of the Concawe workshop held in Helsinki, Finland at the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) on the 8th November 2023.

The workshop aimed to increase the understanding of regulators, industry scientists, and academic scientists about the challenges in analysis of petroleum UVCB substance composition to support EU REACH human health & environment hazard assessments, particularly with regard to high boiling point and high-complexity petroleum substances. Posters from ten academic and independent testing laboratories were presented to demonstrate the current analytical capabilities with these substances.

The 130 attendees from ECHA, Member State competent authorities, the oil and chemical industries and analytical laboratories discussed both the chemical analysis requirements of the REACH regulations with  presentations from ECHA and Concawe and the potential to provide information to meet these requirements with the current and evolving analytical technologies.

Discussions at the workshop highlighted the need for further work to clarify the analytical data required to comply with regulations. A number of limitations in the currently available analytical technologies are to be addressed including the extension of comprehensive and quantitative analysis of constituent groups with carbon numbers above C30 and the development of mass spectrometric output and data interpretation to allow both quantitative and structural information to be determined.