Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer, Shell Lubricants India and Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer, Shell Lubricants India, talk about change in emission rules and their new products.

What kind of new trends are emerging in lubricants and what is your contribution?
(Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer)
As far as transition from BS4 to BS6 is concerned, we are simply following the processes and our retail station will also be selling BS6 fuel. And larger part of the market, we are already presented with BS6 fuel, which market basically demands. Brazil is one market where we have significant data and practical use of bio fuels, so we have to adapt. Parallely, we are also evaluating the options on how do we ramp up gas usage for India perspective. If you name the category of fuel in terms of either pilot or implementation in the market, we are there. We are adapting to the changing times and making our lubricants on market demands.

How can Shell solutions enhance the productivity as well as life of OEMs?
(Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer)
We can do it in a number of ways. We have a product range that suits mostly all of our customer needs, from some entry up to very premium and then were accompanied such as a lot of value is by the combination of our products and technology. And also increasingly, our services help b2b customers to help them lower their total cost of ownership. So, by using better quality and production increases and other services and things like conditioning, monitoring of machines and sampling. We help customers to maintain new equipment for longer, get more usage out of it and reduce things like downtime, which obviously saves the customers a lot more money and makes them more efficient and effective in relation to purchasing of costs.

How do you see the quality of fuel in India compared to global scenario?
(Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer)
The quality of fuel is improving. The shift from BS4 to BS6 has been a huge leap. It will help emissions and quality; it’s a much higher standard as a benchmark in the market. And if you combine that with also better-quality lubricants, then it helps the emissions even further. It helps customers with fuel saving as well as in reducing CO2 emissions.

How do you position yourself in Excon for large solutions?
(Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer)
We find this is a great way to have all OEMs in one place. It’s quite important for us not to look the pain points on lubricant point of view but whatever integrated solutions you bring to the end user and also manufacturers. We have launched a complete services portfolio and are positioning ourselves as a solution provider for the protection not as a lubricant solution. And the services include the wider portfolio. So starting with the fleet management program, we’re starting with basically the complete lubricant management on fleet. When we talk about mining and construction industry, the major challenges always lies with customer. Because of the severe condition oil degrades and it is very important for them to have because the oil is not only telling me about the performance of one but then it also tells me that equipments are operating in the same condition. A typical process of taking samples and sending it to the lab and the turnaround time can vary from three to 15 days depending upon the location. We have brought a customised portable machine wide end of the system which has LED light which we have introduced and already successfully running in a couple of construction sites.

Are you selling LED lights standalone or as integrated solutions?
(Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer)
It depends upon the choice of customer and you can’t be rigid. Some customers take the option of buying and they turn around and say that sample is pretty high and they get the pay back to this machine. But I think till our contributions come into action, because even if the light in the sample it goes into our loop analyst cloud, where we get all the data then we have the interpretation and our expert advice goes to the customer. In some cases like a customer who just wants to send the sample, and then we make an arrangement with investing in the lab, we have our members during the testing, when the customer is sending the sample, and when they get the reports for the recommendation. So, it’s flexible.

Could you shed some light on video check technology?
(Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer)
The job of video check is to diagnose the problem. So, in an engine what is happening in the combustion chamber, there are two possibilities. Either you completely strip down the engine and look at the parts. The other possibility using this video check when you take out the injection modular sparkler, put the probe inside and see the conditions liner, the distance and that tells you what is happening in the combustion and whether the condition is good or it needs protection.

What kind of lubricants can we see in future?
(Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer)
We have to look at the EVs (Electrical Vehicles) and whether we would be using lubricants because we are eliminating the internal combustion engine. And as EV advances we are looking at how to make it more efficient and how can we execute for long because bigger battery means you also need a bigger arrangement of the lubricant which can effectively cool down. There would be some of the electronic component which will be exposed to the lubricants and you have to be extremely careful. We are ready with the complete portfolio.

We have launched a complete services portfolio and are positioning ourselves as a solution provider for the protection not as a lubricant solution.
Praveen Nagpal, Chief Technology Officer, Shell Lubricants India

The quality of fuel is improving. The shift from BS4 to BS6 has been a huge leap. It will help emissions and quality; it’s a much higher standard as a benchmark in the market.
Gareth Flood, Chief Marketing Officer, Shell Lubricants India