The UK is rolling out E10 from September 2021

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The UK is rolling out E10 from September 2021
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The UK is rolling out E10 from September 2021

Great Britain introduces biofuels
British are preparing for E10 from September

The British can fill up with E10 from September 2021. A large-scale E10 campaign has now started to raise awareness and promote bioethanol fuel.


Dina Dervisevic

06/11/2021

In this article:

  • Who is E10?
  • More consumption with E10
  • Environmentalists criticize E10
  • BDBe defends sustainability from E10
  • E10 usage in Germany
  • Conclusion

The British get E10. Excuse me, haven’t they had that before? Right. In Germany, E10 was introduced step by step from 2011, ten years later the British dare. The background to this is a series of measures that the British government decided to take to reduce emissions from road transport. The introduction of E10 is intended to help reduce carbon emissions – by 2050 at the latest, the UK wants to have a zero on this balance sheet.

Who does E10?

The E10 campaign aims to ensure that drivers know which fuel is approved for their vehicle and that alcohol made from sugar does not end up in the wrong tanks. An estimated 750,000 motorcycles could be affected, mostly older models, as the British motorcycle journalists from visordown.com suspect.

In older vehicles, ethanol can have harmful effects on important components of the motorcycle, such as hoses and seals. Since the beginning of the 2000s, vehicles that can be operated with fuels such as E10 have predominantly been produced. But here, too, the effects of the fuel with up to 10 percent bioethanol are not necessarily zero. The activated charcoal filters in particular can be permanently damaged by the vapors of the E10 fuel – we reported on the extensive tests carried out by the Fraunhofer Institute UMSICHT show (Institute for Environment, Safety and Energy Technology).

Additional consumption with E10

In terms of additional consumption, it is assumed that there will be 1.5 to 3 percent compared to the E5 fuel. A MOTORRAD test in 2011 on 30,000 kilometers confirmed this to a limited extent: the MOTORRAD fleet fueled with E10 consumed just under one percent, around 0.06 liters per 100 kilometers.

Environmentalists criticize E10

Environmentalists criticize the E10 fuel and sometimes even declare it as harmful to the environment. Because large quantities of wheat, sugar beet and corn have to be grown for the global use of bioethanol, a conversion would take place, according to Greenpeace: “Old areas are used for agro-fuel plants to meet the additional demand for vegetable oil and ethanol for European car tanks. For other types of use – for example palm oil for the cosmetics industry – new areas are cleared or flared. This is how climate protection becomes a farce. Because primeval forests are natural CO2 stores. Cutting them down or even burning them on fire increases global CO2 emissions even further.” (https://www.greenpeace.de/themen/landwirtschaft/biosprit/biosprit-ist-umweltpolitischer-unfug)

In addition, biofuel can drive up grain prices around the world. In 2012, the then Federal Minister for Development Aid Dirk Niebel was the first member of the federal government to plead for the abolition of E10.

BDBe defends sustainability from E10

The Federal Association of the German Bioethanol Industry (BDBe) emphasizes the sustainability claim of bioethanol and also addresses the much discussed indirect land use change, to which the environmentalists from Greenpeace refer in the previous quote:

“The EU Commission has determined that the only risk of indirect land use change is palm oil. At the same time, the study has shown that the cultivation of the agricultural raw materials used for European bioethanol production, such as wheat, maize and sugar beet, does not pose any risk to land use changes. Rainforests, peat bogs and areas with high biodiversity are effectively excluded from the cultivation of raw materials for bioethanol.” (www.bdbe.de/oekologie/nachhaltigkeit)

E10 usage in Germany

According to BDBe, E10’s market share in Germany was 13.7 percent in 2019 and rose to 14 percent in 2020. “According to an ADAC study, the refueling behavior has not changed significantly compared to the E-10, the technical concerns are still great. Rightly so it seems.”, like colleague Jens Kratschmar with his Research on the topic “Long-term damage from E10 petrol” noted.

opinion poll

How do you feel about the biofuel E10?

Voted 171 times

E10 approval for my motorcycle means for me: I fill up with E10.

Under no circumstances will that get into my tank!

My car gets E10, my bikes get premium fuel.

Conclusion

Will E10 be better received by the British than by the Germans? We are excited. In any case, one thing is already certain: climate footprints cannot only be viewed within national borders, but should be viewed globally. Otherwise we often only achieve a shift instead of an actual improvement.

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