Oil Minister Hardeep Singh Puri on Tuesday dismissed claims of biofuels damaging automobile engines as rubbish and said petrol blended with 20 per cent ethanol is environmentally safe to use.
“All the stories you hear about biofuels being harmful for engines, there’s a lot of ‘BS’ – ‘B’ capital, ‘S’, capital. and I don’t know what that means, but it’s a specializer,” he said at KPMG’s annual energy and resources conclave, ENRich 2025 here.
Though he did not specify, he implied a cuss word for ‘rubbish’.
Petrol blended with 20 per cent ethanol extracted from sugarcane or foodgrains, is safe to use, he said.
With all of the 90,000-plus petrol pumps across the country selling only E20 petrol (80 per cent petrol and 20 per cent ethanol), some motorists complained about the impact on older vehicles. Carmakers added to the confusion by initially saying E20 fuel had not been tested for compatibility with older vehicles, but later backtracked to say they were safe to use.
Puri and his ministry have repeatedly dismissed fears around the use of E20 as unfounded but said older vehicles may need to replace some rubber parts and gaskets which is a “simple process”.
Puri on Tuesday said the percentage of ethanol blended in petrol in 2014 was 1.4 per cent which has now reached 20 per cent. “And I want to put a full stop there. We will now assess where we have to go. All the stories you hear that we are now going to do another leapfrog, etc, we haven’t come to that conclusion,” he said.
On the criticism about the use of E20, he said people write about interviewing somebody who is an automobile engineer whose 2021 or 2022 purchased car was doing very well until E20 came.
But the important point is to find which car was being used by the automobile engineer and where he lives. “If he lives in Gurugram or in Delhi and goes to Gurugram everyday, I can give you 21 reasons why the efficiency of the car we talked about (will go down).”
For a country that is 88 per cent dependent on imports to meet its oil needs, biofuels and cleaner energy are imperative of the time, he said.
Going by projections made by the International Energy Agency, the Indian demand for energy will rise three times the global demand for the next two decades. “25 per cent of the increase in demand (globally) will come from India.”
Puri said India had 700 GCCs in 2010 which have grown to 1800 now and will rise to 2200 by 2030. They employ 1.9 million professionals and generate USD 65 billion in annual revenue. By 2030, this will grow to 2.8 million jobs and over USD 100 billion in revenue.
Responding to social media chatter about the impact of 20 per cent ethanol-blended petrol on vehicles, Puri’s ministry had last month stated that concerns over a drastic drop in fuel efficiency are misplaced, adding that the fuel in fact offers improved acceleration.
Doping petrol with 20 per cent ethanol extracted from sugarcane or maize is a national programme aimed at cutting emissions and raising income of farmers, which is being sought to be “derailed” by some by fomenting fear and confusion, it had said.
On August 4, the ministry had in a post on X said: “Ethanol, being lower in energy density than petrol, results in a marginal decrease in mileage, estimated at 1-2 per cent for four-wheelers designed for E10 and calibrated for E20, and around 3-6 per cent in others.”
Social media posts have pointed out that the calorific value of ethanol is 29.7 as compared to 46.4 of petrol and so the energy produced per litre is 65 per cent of petrol.
E10 is petrol mixed with 10 per cent ethanol.
Social media posts also cite June 2021 Niti Aayog report to state that E20/E27 in E10 cars degrades rubber/plastic, corrodes metal, harms fuel systems, cuts mileage and may lead to need for part upgrades.
