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Berlin backtracks on fuel additive plan for vehicles

The German government reversed a decision to double the ethanol and renewable additives content of gasoline and diesel to 10 percent, a plan that threatened to boost fuel prices for millions of car drivers.

Under the plan that was to go into effect in January, more than 1 million mainly foreign-brand vehicles would not be able to burn the new fuel mix, forcing drivers to fill up with more expensive “super-plus” gas, German Environment Minister Sigmar Gabriel told a news conference in Berlin yesterday.

“We don’t want to take responsibility if several million people who drive old cars only because they live on lower wages have to use expensive” fuel, he said.

Gabriel came under pressure from members of his own Social Democratic Party as well as German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats to ease pressure on car owners who are already suffering from surging fuel prices, Bild said.

As many as 3 million cars won’t be able to burn the so-called E10 blend, some estimates say, a figure well above the 375,000 vehicles that the German carmakers’ association has estimated.

“In light of the fact that more than 3 million vehicles are not suited to run on E10, it can hardly be expected that there would be any other outcome,” Ulrich Becker, vice president of the ADAC German Automobile Association, Europe’s biggest lobby group with 15 million members, said on the group’s Web site yesterday.

ADAC expects biofuels and ethanol to play an “important” role in mobility after 2012 when the number of vehicles built to burn a higher content of renewable gasoline and diesel is higher than it is now, Becker said.

Burning biodiesel made from rapeseed and ethanol made from wheat, barley and sugar beet generates up to 40 percent less carbon dioxide, the Environment Ministry has said.

Merkel wants a fifth of car fuel to comprise bio-supplements by 2020.

Germany’s plans complement a EU proposal to increase production of ethanol to meet a mandatory target that biofuels power 10 percent of transportation by 2020. Transport accounts for a fifth of the 27-nation bloc’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Governments are encouraging the use of alternative fuels to limit carbon-dioxide emissions blamed for global warming and to reduce dependency on oil imports.

Crude oil reached US$104.35 a barrel in New York on Thursday, a 62 percent rise from a year earlier.

Studies conducted by Oxfam, Greenpeace and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have said that biofuels will have a limited effect on overall emissions, substantially increase food costs and damage the environment.
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