An article on the BBC website this week intrigued me greatly. Headed “India’s biofuel drive is saving billions but also sparking worries”, it tells a mixed tale in connection with India’s drive to increase the ethanol mix in the petrol used by the vehicles on its roads. The saved billions alluded to in the title are dollars ($15.5 billion to be precise), representing foreign exchange saved since 2014. Presumably this is a calculation based on money saved in buying less oil and/or refined petroleum. The saving in CO2 emissions, which is the justification for the programme of blending 20% ethanol with petrol, known as E20, seems less impressive. The BBC article claims that – again since 2014 – it has resulted in the avoidance of 69.8 million tonnes of CO2 emissions. This sounds impressive, until one realises that it represents a saving of less than 7 million tonnes of CO2 per annum. The Emissions Database for Global Atmospheric Research (EDGAR) tells us that in 2023 alone, India emitted 4,133.55 million tonnes of CO2 equivalent, a figure that continues to rise year on year. And whilst climate worriers would tells us that every saving, however small, is important, it has to be conceded that this represents an insignificant saving in the scheme of things.

Of course, the Indian government might be justified in going down this route if there was no downside, or if the downsides were modest compared to the gains. But is this the case? Well, the BBC article suggests that so far as Indians are concerned, the downsides are actually pretty substantial.

The first massive problem is that many vehicles in India are not E20-compliant. One might have thought that the Indian government would have taken that into account before pressing ahead with the policy, but apparently not. Critics claim that ethanol is more corrosive and has lower energy density than petrol, resulting in lower mileage and greater wear and tear on vehicle engine parts. The Indian government’s response, in the form of a press release issued earlier this month, reads to an outsider as an extremely arrogant response, reminiscent of Marie-Antoinette and “let them eat cake”:

Biofuels and Natural Gas are India’s bridge fuels. They represent a viable, non-disruptive transition towards meeting our commitments to a greener world and are in line with our Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) wherein India has signed up to Net Zero by 2070….The use of E-20 gives better acceleration, better ride quality and most importantly, lowered carbon emissions by approximately 30% as compared to E10 fuel….

Non-disruptive and most important to Indian government ministers, perhaps, but not to the mass of the Indian people. Still, when did politicians ever listen to the concerns of the people when it comes to reducing greenhouse gas emissions?

The Marie-Antoinette of the Indian government made another appearance on X:

In a post on X, the ministry said that engine tuning and E20-compatible materials could minimise the drop in mileage. It also advised replacing certain parts in older vehicles, saying the process was inexpensive and “easily done during regular servicing of the vehicle”.

It doesn’t seem to occur to them that a combination of more expensive fuel, fewer miles per gallon, and damage to engine parts, avoidable only by spending more money on adaption, aren’t what poor Indian people need or want.

“Why should I be forced to buy petrol that offers less mileage and then spend more to make the materials compliant?” he [Amit Pandhi, who has owned a Maruti Suzuki car in Delhi since 2017] asked.

Did I mention that the E20 fuel is more expensive? Ed Miliband and others in the UK Labour government claim that the UK needs renewable energy to avoid expensive fossil fuels, only to watch the price of renewable energy rise inexorably and cost more than electricity generated by fossil fuels. In India, the government claims that ethanol was cheaper than petrol when it went down this road, but now has to acknowledge that “[o]ver time, procurement price of ethanol has increased and now the weighted average price of ethanol is higher than cost of refined petrol”.

One might expect that this would give them pause for thought, and at least lead to no further work on the programme until the situation becomes clearer. But no:

India, however, is planning to go even beyond E20.

“The country will now gradually scale towards E25, E27, and E30 in a phased, calibrated manner,” Petroleum Minister Hardeep Puri said recently.

That’s despite the fact that – according to the BBC – this policy is also concerning climate researchers and food policy experts. Why might that be? Because sugar cane (currently used to produce 40%) and maize are used to produce India’s ethanol, farms are now growing crops for fuel rather than for food. Furthermore, this will only get worse, as demand for fuel for vehicles is expected to double by 2050, at which point 20 billion litres of ethanol will be needed (I assume annually, though the article doesn’t make that clear). This creates another problem. If India continues to rely on sugar cane to make ethanol, it will be relying on a water-intensive crop, or it can rely more on crops such as maize and rice (I should have thought that growing rice is pretty water-intensive activity too). Last year, as part of this shift, India became a net importer of maize for the first time. So much for the boost to India’s balance of payments by importing less oil and/or refined petroleum.

Furthermore, this use of maize means the poultry sector is having to spend more on corn for use as feedstock, while the Food Corporation of India (FCI) has allocated an unprecedented 5.2 million tons of rice for ethanol production. According to the BBC article, the FCI’s rice stocks are traditionally earmarked for the poor of India at subsidised prices. We are offered a very salient quote in this regard from a “farming sector expert”:

In a country like India, where 250 million people go hungry, we cannot use food to feed the cars.

Other downsides weren’t mentioned (at least, not in detail) in the BBC article, but given that they represent environmental problems, I would suggest that they are particularly important in the context of a policy that is being justified by reference to its supposedly positive environmental impact. The BBC article refers to research carried out by CSTEP (The Center for Study of Science, Technology and Policy), but more can be found about their research here:

This [the E20 policy] will entail about 8 million hectares of additional land for maize cultivation by 2030, equivalent to roughly a quarter of India’s total agricultural land, the think tank said.

I confess I have made no attempt to verify their analysis, since if it is even partially correct it suggests that the E20 policy is hugely problematic. For instance, it is claimed that every litre of ethanol produced from sugar cane requires the use of 2,860 litres of water. According to CSTEP, rising ethanol production would require 50 billion cubic metres of water by 2070 – as CSTEP puts it, enough water to meet Delhi’s water needs for 17 years.

It’s also worth mentioning that if India shifts to using rice for ethanol production, then as well as potentially harming India’s poor, it could result in substantial methane emissions. We are told, by WWF that rice-growing is responsible for 12% of global methane emissions and 1.5% of total greenhouse gas emissions.

Even if we assume that India’s E20 plan (to become over time an E30 plan) will make a modest reduction in CO2 emissions – let’s be generous and call it 20 million tonnes of CO2 reduction per annum by 2050 – that seems like a very modest benefit compared to the societal and environmental harms associated with the policy. And it really is a drop in the ocean when one considers India’s growing demand for coal. According to the IEA “[c]oal consumption in India is expected to grow by 2.5% in 2026”.

Meanwhile, in the UK (leading the world, remember), “Fuel plant closure ‘devastating’ for workers”.

The closure of the UK’s largest bioethanol plant is “devastating” news, regional politicians have claimed.

The closure is being blamed on the terms of the UK/US trade agreement recently negotiated by the UK government.

The government said it had taken the decision in the national interest.

So much for all those green jobs. It’s a crazy old world, right enough.