Pull into a petrol pump in Delhi, and you will be sold E20: a solution that’s four parts petrol and one part ethanol. You have no say in it. Since April, it is the only petrol India sells.
At a small number of pumps, you can now buy something much stronger, though not petrol-wise. It’s (almost) 100 per cent ethanol. Indian Oil sells it in Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu and Delhi.
Almost nobody can put it in their vehicle.
Registration records show 1,662 vehicles across the whole country that could burn it, all added between January 2024 and July 2026. Only nine of them are cars.
That gap is the story. India spent 25 years building the supply. It never built anything to burn it in.
WHAT IS ETHANOL, AND WHY IS IT IN MY PETROL?
Ethanol is alcohol; the same molecule that’s in beer or whisky, made the same way: yeast eats sugar and gives off alcohol. You already meet it a dozen times a week without noticing, in hand sanitisers, perfume, and paint thinners.
The only differences at a distillery are what the yeast is fed and how thoroughly the water is boiled off afterwards. Feed it sugarcane, and you get ethanol. Feed it maize, or rice, or grain too damaged to eat, and you get the same ethanol. Little is wasted at the end either. The spent grain is dried and sold on as cattle feed.
That flexibility is the whole point. Ethanol can be made from things India already grows. Petrol cannot. Every litre blended is a litre of crude oil not imported.
It also explains why the fuel is not cheap. The government buys ethanol at fixed rates, which depend onwhat it’s made from: Rs 57.97 a litre from C-molasses, Rs 60.32 from surplus rice, and Rs 71.86 from maize in the current supply year. Sugarcane was the original feedstock. Grain is now about two-thirds of the supply, which is why a fuel programme now finds itself arguing about food.
E20, E85, E100. WHAT IS THE DIFFERENCE?
The names are just the ethanol percentage, and they are the most confused part of this story. E20 is 20 per cent ethanol. It is what comes out of every petrol nozzle in India today. E85 is 80–85 per cent ethanol and 14–19 per cent petrol. The petroleum ministry launched it at 48 outlets on June 5.
E100 is the one that sounds like pure ethanol. But it’s not. It is 92–94 per cent ethanol, with 4–5 per cent petrol added, so the flame is visible, plus a co-solvent to prevent separation.
Except E20, none will run in an ordinary car. They need a flex-fuel engine, built to take any mix from petrol to almost-pure alcohol.
DOES INDIA HAVE ENOUGH ETHANOL?
Comfortably. That was never the problem.
India hit 20 per cent blending in 2025, five years ahead of the original 2030 target. Distilleries can now make about 1,990 crore litres a year. Keeping every pump in the country stocked with E20 takes about 1,130 crore litres. India makes roughly 1.76 times that.
Monthly figures from the Petroleum Planning and Analysis Cell show how the last stretch went. Blending sat around 11–12 per cent through 2023 and reached 16.1 per cent by October 2024. Then it stopped. Across all 13 months the agency has reported since January 2025, it has stayed just under 20 per cent.
That flat line is a fuel supplied to order. Blending climbs to the target and halts there, because the government requires it, not because drivers ask for it. The surplus, some 860 crore litres a year, is the reason higher blends exist at all. The distilleries are built, the loans are drawn, and the ethanol needs somewhere to go.
HOW MANY VEHICLES CAN ACTUALLY USE THE STRONGER FUEL?
India Today’s Data Intelligence Unit pulled the registrations from the road transport ministry’s Vahan database, filtered to the two fuel categories that matter: ETHANOL (E100) and FLEX-FUEL (ETHANOL).
Three manufacturers appear. Honda Motorcycle and Scooter India accounts for 1,498 registrations — almost all in 2025. Hero MotoCorp has 155, all in 2026. Maruti Suzuki has nine.
Every Honda and Hero vehicle is a two-wheeler. The nine Maruti cars are the entire flex-fuel car market in a country that buys roughly four lakh passenger vehicles a month. All nine were registered in 2026. Filtered to four-wheelers, the dashboard returns no ethanol or flex-fuel car at all for 2024 and 2025.
We pulled that figure twice independently on July 31. Both pulls returned the same single row.
The few buyers are also in the wrong places. Those 1,662 vehicles are spread across 27 states and Union Territories; the fuel is sold in five. About half the fleet sits where it cannot be filled. But there are plans to expand supply to more pumps.
The contrast with the country India cites as its model is stark. More than 80 per cent of Brazil’s light vehicle fleet runs on flex-fuel technology, according to the petroleum ministry’s own briefing. India has built Brazil’s supply side without Brazil’s demand side.
IS THE STRONGER FUEL CHEAPER TO DRIVE ON?
No, and this is the part most likely to surprise a driver.
E85 sells in Delhi at about Rs 82 a litre against Rs 102.12that the petroleum ministry lists for E20 petrol in Delhi in June 2026, “nearly Rs 20 per litre lower“, as it put it at launch.
The catch is that alcohol carries less energy than petrol, so you burn more of it to go the same distance. A litre of E85 holds roughly 21–24 per cent less energy, depending on where in the 80–85 per cent range it is blended. But the price is only about 20 per cent lower. At standard energy values for both fuels, a kilometre on E85 works out at about 3–5 per cent more, not less.
Brazil’s drivers use a rule of thumb: ethanol is worth buying when it’s about 70 per cent of the petrol price, and E85 in Delhi sits at 80 per cent of it.
E100 is harder still. To match E20’s cost per kilometre, it would have to retail near Rs 72 a litre. The government already pays Rs 71.86 a litre for maize ethanol before GST, transport, storage and depot handling. The raw material alone eats the entire break-even price.
Then there is the vehicle. Maruti’s flex-fuel WagonR costs Rs 7,23,900 ex-showroom, about Rs 85,000 more than the petrol version. Nine buyers have made that trade.
WHERE DOES INDIA STAND IN THE WORLD?
Third position, and not by a little. India makes eight per cent of the world’s fuel-ethanol, behind the US at 51 per cent, and Brazil at 27 per cent, according to the Renewable Fuels Association.
So the shortage is not of ethanol. India has more than it requires (for fuel), and a fuel at the top of that ladder that is not quite what its name says, costs more to drive on than the petrol it replaces, and is sold in five states.
Nine cars in the country are registered to drink it so far.
– Ends
