Why Raising the Alcohol Content of Europe’s Fuels Could Reduce Carbon Emissions

(Horizon Magazine) By 2030, a fifth of the fuel that motorists put into the petrol tanks of their cars could be alcohol, according to research concluding that new petrol and ethanol blends can reduce carbon emissions from Europe’s transport sector with little additional cost to consumers.

Most petrol now sold at pumps in Europe is a blend of 5% bioethanol and 95% gasoline, denoted by an E5 label, while some countries have moved to a new generation of fuel that contains up to 10% bioethanol, known as E10.

The European Committee for Standardization (CEN) commissioned research looking at the costs and benefits of introducing a fuel containing 20% bioethanol, or E20. The results from the project, which concluded towards the end of 2019, will help them develop new quality and specification standards that will be required before it can be sold.

‘The conclusion we have reached is that all the vehicles coming onto the market and those since 2011 should be able to handle fuels with up to 20% ethanol,’ said Ortwin Costenoble, a senior standardisation consultant at the Royal Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN), which led the project. ‘We were working on the basis that in 2030, countries would adopt E20 as the main source of fuel.’

Under the EU’s renewable energy directive, 10% of the fuel used in transport will need to come from renewable sources such as biofuel by the end of 2020. The 2018 revision of this directive set a target of 14% renewable energy being used in all transport by 2030.

At present, the majority of EU member states use E5 petrol in their vehicles. Some countries, however, have started moving to E10. In January, Denmark, Hungary, Lithuania and Slovakia became the latest countries to introduce E10 to their forecourts, bringing the total number of EU member states to sell the fuel at the majority of retail stations to 13.

But the CEN study found that while fuel consumption would go up if countries switched to using E20 fuel, due to the increased amount of ethanol, carbon dioxide emissions overall would go down 10% compared to all cars using E10.

‘If you use a normal octane fuel blend with 20% bioethanol, the fuel consumption increases only by 4%,’ said Costenoble. But with more ethanol you may allow the octane component of gasoline to rise, and vehicles running on fuels with a higher-octane rating tend to be more efficient.

The researchers estimated that if all 28 EU countries (the UK was still part of the EU at the time of the study) adopted E20, it could reduce greenhouse gas emissions by the equivalent of 25.4Mt (mega-tonnes) of carbon dioxide – about 8.2% of the current emissions from gasoline in the EU.

Existing policies are one of the roadblocks standing in the way of E20 fuel from coming on the market in the EU. The fuel quality directive, for example, currently only allows 10% of a fuel to be replaced with ethanol, a measure originating from a time when the impact of increasing alcohol levels on vehicle emissions was unknown.

‘It seems like a logical step to introduce E20 and everyone we spoke to seems to want it, but at the moment it is an illegal fuel,’ said Costenoble. A change in the regulations will be needed before it can be introduced, but he hopes manufacturers and standardisation writers will begin preparing for E20 before that happens.

Another hurdle will be public acceptance. As most vehicles currently on the road are able to run on E10 and can move to E20 with some calibration or inexpensive upgrades costing a few hundred euros, there is unlikely to be much public opposition, according to Bernabeu.

But if the cost of fuel itself increases because it contains higher levels of ethanol, it is likely to be welcomed far less. The work by Costenoble and his colleagues, however, found that E20 could be produced with current refinery infrastructure, which would need minimal adjustments.

Making the fuel supply logistics chain compatible with E20 would cost less than one cent per litre, says Costenoble.

But the cost of fuel to consumers mainly depends on varying market price of oil and ethanol, combined with the tax applied by different countries. READ MORE