NEW DELHI: Indicating that govt is unlikely to increase ethanol blending in petrol beyond the current 20% (E20) for existing vehicles, adviser to PM Tarun Kapoor said Wednesday that allowing higher ethanol blending will have to be an option with flex-fuel vehicles.Addressing an event of sugar industry body Isma virtually, Kapoor said E20 has been very successful. “Now, our focus is on going into flex-fuel vehicles and allowing blending at a percentage which will be higher than E20, and definitely it will have to be an option for flex-fuel vehicles,” he added.He noted that several vehicle manufacturers have announced plans to roll out flex-fuel vehicles. These vehicles can run on petrol with higher ethanol blending of up to 85% and even 100% in some cases. Kapoor said there is a possibility of more such vehicles hitting the road while mentioning some petrol pumps are already making higher blends available and that this needs expansion.“But it has to go hand-in-hand with the availability of flex-fuel vehicles,” the top bureaucrat said.Dismissing criticisms against ethanol blending in petrol, Kapoor said it may be due to “misinformation or certain other motivated reasons”. He said a lot of studies and experiments have shown that E20 is good and works very well. Kapoor said there may be “a little bit of fuel efficiency”, but the decline gets compensated with higher octane. He said the issues which are being faced are generally due to “other reasons, not due to this blending”.
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Kapoor also said if India can also get some product which can be used in diesel, then it will be great considering that in a refinery, a large percentage of the product is diesel.“So we can’t have petrol demand going down, whereas diesel demand is going up. So, we would like to balance that; we need something to add to diesel also. And if experiments are going on on isobutanol, if that succeeds, then that would open another area where biofuels can be required in large quantities, and then that would be great for us,” he added.
