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Our Mission

AFPM members serve you and America by manufacturing vital products for your life every day, while strengthening America’s economic and national security.

About Our Members

  • Environmental Stewardship

    The member companies of AFPM are strongly committed to clean air and water and have made major investments to improve the environment.

    Between 1990 and 2008, our members spent $112 billion to bring refineries into compliance with environmental emissions regulations — equivalent to $394 in environmental spending for every U.S. citizen.

    U.S. refining companies had invested $20 billion by 2010 to comply with new clean fuel regulations to reduce the sulfur content of gasoline and both highway and off-road diesel.

    As a result of emissions reductions by our members and by other industries, America’s air today is cleaner than it has been in generations. Refiners have cut sulfur levels in gasoline by 90 percent just since 2004. We have also reduced sulfur in diesel fuel by more than 90 percent since 2005 and reduced benzene in conventional gasoline by 45 percent since 2010.

    EPA data shows that total emissions of the six principal air pollutants in the United States have dropped by 57 percent since 1980 and ozone levels have decreased by 30 percent. These reductions occurred even as industrial output and the number of vehicles on the road have increased. EPA data indicates there will be continued reductions in the years ahead under regulations already in place.

    Refiners have spent nearly $50 billion just to remove sulfur from gasoline and diesel fuel and to manufacture reformulated gasoline. AFPM members have additionally addressed requirements for low Reid Vapor Pressure gasoline, including specially blended fuels required by State Implementation Plans under the Clean Air Act, which have reduced hydrocarbon emissions, an ozone precursor.

    Despite the great progress we have made in environmental stewardship under the Clean Air Act and other laws, we are concerned that EPA and other agencies have at times moved from regulation to overregulation, making unreasonable and often conflicting demands on our members to spend enormous sums to make changes in their manufacturing processes that bring little or no significant environmental benefit.