Estonians quarrel over quality of petrol

"There is nothing wrong with our fuel", experts say

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Estonian experts deny the recent allegations that the petrol sold in the country would be of poor quality. Raul Ernes, head of the Estonian Tribology Institute, claimed last week in an interview on Estonian television that one can drive further with Finnish fuel than with fuel purchased in Estonia.
      Indrek Kaju, CEO of Neste Eesti AS, says that the claims are based on a non-existent research. According to Kaju, both in Estonia and Finland a similar kind of unleaded petrol is sold that will become compulsory in the entire EU area in 2009. Neste Eesti imports its petrol from Lithuania and Finland.
      “The only fancy thing about the Tribology Institute is its name. This is a question of its only owner and employee Raul Ernes’s desperate attempt to gain attention”, Kaju says.
      Toomas Saks, President of the Estonian Association of Oil Companies, also considers Ernes’s claims unfounded. The country’s significant petrol traders and importers are all members of the association.
     
According to Saks, in Estonia the quality of petrol is controlled by the Tax and Customs Office and the Consumer Protection Office, as well as the Estonian Environmental Research Centre. In Saks’s view, the supervision ensures that the petrol sold in Estonia meets all the EU norms.
      Saks explains that 80 per cent of the petrol sold in Estonia comes from the Mazeikiu Refinery in Lithuania. “It may be that someone also imports from Belarus or the Ukraine, but even in these cases the product has to meet the EU quality criteria.”
     
Raul Ernes, who carried out the comparison test, told Helsingin Sanomat that three different brands of fuel sold in Estonia and three brands sold in Finland were included in the test.
      In the test, Ernes filled the tank of his BMW 320 with 40 litres of fuel and drove the same test distance at the same average speed. Ernes observed that the car consumed 1-1.5 litres more 98-octane petrol per hundred kilometres when using fuel bought in Estonia compared with Finnish fuel. He refrained from revealing the name of the petrol station chain from where the fuel had been purchased.
      “My aim was to show that the matter should be investigated, not to start pointing fingers at a certain fuel trader”, Ernes says.
      According to Ernes, petrol of poor quality is mixed with chemicals that will enable it to meet the EU criteria. He also says that the Estonian Tax and Customs Office are interested in conducting a new test in cooperation with the Tribology Institute in July.
     
The Tax and Customs Office expert Enn-Toivo Annuk, however, denied such rumours.
      Annuk does not take the Tribology Institute seriously.
      “If they want to conduct a study, they can do it with their own money. We can be in attendance.”


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