PREMIUM: The radical green change to Irish petrol nobody is talking about

If you are an average Irish road user, chances are that the most you know about the fuel that goes in your car is that it is either petrol or diesel. There’s no shame in that – as long as the car works, you have no real reason to know or care. But your lack of knowledge almost certainly means that when I write that the Government is phasing out E5 gasoline at the petrol pumps and replacing it with E10 gasoline, you haven’t the first idea what that means. And yet, this is a change that will have significant impacts on a large number of people.

The first thing to understand is what it means: The “5” and the “10” in E5 and E10 respectively refer to the percentage of the fuel that is made up of so-called biofuels – ethanol, mainly. Ethanol is derived from corn and sugarbeets and is a kind of colourless alcohol.