Blogs have a role as a kind of free-thinking space, a public confessional that sits somewhere between personal diary and newspaper opinion piece. And my confession of the week is that I have been experimenting with biofuels, most specifically bioethanol. Honestly, I don’t know why it’s taken so long. In recent months I’ve become aware that a few filling station forecourts near my home in France are selling what’s known as E85, a blend of bioethanol and unleaded petrol that varies in percentage between around 70% bioethanol in winter and 85% bioethanol in summer, hence the name.

E85 has been on the market in France since late 2006, but finding it on sale isn’t easy. In November last year there were said to be 316 pumps serving E85 nationwide. Thankfully I now drive past one of those pumps every day, so at the start of this year I decided to pop some in the tank and see what happened.

Beforehand I’d done some research, and as usual when you hunt about online, I found a huge range of opinions on whether the engine of my car, a 2002 petrol made by a big German brand, would need to be adapted to run on E85. There are plenty of websites promoting control units that change the rate of flow of fuel into the engine, and there are more complete kits that also modify the ECU and change the spark plugs. Online you can find those that say E85 should only be used in so-called Flex-Fuel cars that are built from the factory to burn bioethanol, and you can find plenty of people who have invested in a converter box and run thousands of kilometres without any problems. There are also voices who claim that it’s quite possible for the average petrol car to run on a 50-50 mix of bioethanol and unleaded petrol without any modification, and a minority who run E85 only with no modifications. The argument goes that ethanol can corrode some part of the fuel system, but again, opinions over how long, and how many kilometres it takes to have a negative effect vary enormously.

So what happened? Well I started with a 20 litre-40 litre blend of bioethanol and unleaded, and the car ran just fine. Five hundred kilometres later I upped the ante, again, without making any modifications whatsoever to the engine. I moved to a 25l-35l blend, and still everything worked fine, and I’m now running a very loose 50-50 bioethanol-unleaded mix without a single problem. The car starts cold just as it always did, fuel economy hasn’t changed measurably, and engine performance is perfectly on a par with 100% unleaded from what I can tell.

On a personal level this is a bit of a breakthrough, as I have the liberated feeling of burning fuel produced not thousands of kilometres away in some foreign land, but a few hundred kilometres away in the so-called agri-industrial plains of Picardy and Champagne. My wallet is feeling a little liberation too, as E85 sells for 85 euro cents a litre, compared to nearly two euros a litre for the 100% fossil fuel equivalent. In terms of cutting my carbon footprint I can’t help but think this must be a good thing, although again digging around online shows that there is a huge range of opinion on how green these fuels are. Rough estimates of a well-to-wheel cut in CO2 emissions from running on E85 only range from 20% to 80%. Whatever it is, it’s better than it was.

The next step in my experiment is to sell my weighty autobahn cruiser and buy something small, lightweight and cheap, and then take the E85 blend to 100%. I’ll update progress on the commentvisions.com blog once I found a buyer for the old beast and a new set of wheels.