Abstract When considering the environmental issues in machining, the fundamental concern is the use of cutting fluids. Industry and research institutions are looking for ways to reduce the use of cutting fluids for ecological and economical reasons. The disposal of used cutting fluid poses problems to the environment. This has forced engineers to come up with modern ways of cooling technologies during machining. This paper reports on the experimental investigations carried out under dry, minimum quantity of lubricant (MQL), and flood(fully)-lubricated conditions during drilling of aluminium (AA1050). The experiments were planned based on orthogonal arrays, made with prefixed cutting parameters (f and Vc) and different lubricated conditions. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) was carried out to check the validity of the proposed parameters and also their percentage contributions. The results of the tests show that with a proper selection of the range of cutting parameters, it is possible to obtain performances similar to flood-lubricated conditions by using MQL.