The Ethanol Papers - Paperturn manuscript - Flipbook - Page 627
the meantime, the petroleum industry is attacking the renewable fuels standard
(RFS), claiming it can’t scale the 10 percent blend wall because retailers don’t
want to sell E15 and consumers don’t want to buy E15. “And that’s simply not
true,” he said, adding that recent events actually demonstrate the need for the
RFS. “The high profit scenario for Big Oil is almost always not the low cost fuel
scenario for consumers,” he said.
Jim Becthold, service manager for Linn Co-op, the first retailer to sell E15 in
Iowa, said customers started asking why the station couldn’t sell E15 right after
the pumps were bagged. The fuel is more economical, cleaner, and higher performing. “Consumers are starting to really demand that, I’m seeing it in my
sales,” he said, adding that he hopes the situation will be resolved so the station
can again sell E15 in the summer months, at least by next summer.”
At the beginning of 2012, the subsidy ended and anti-ethanol people predicted
that E85’s price would rise to be at or higher than regular gasoline. The prices
didn’t really change; Even without the subsidy, I’m still buying E85 at 50 to 60
cents cheaper than regular (E10) and 75 to 90 cents cheaper than premium.
When you factor in the real difference in MPG between using gasoline in a gasoline optimized engine and using ethanol in a gasoline-optimized engine - not
the theoretical 33% difference, the difference is usually enough to provide a net
savings when using the E85.
In other situations, such as those I described earlier in this review, independent
service stations that wish to bring in ethanol-gasoline blends other than E10
and E85, like E15, are often blocked by their gasoline vendors from doing it
although the vendor doesn’t offer E15 themselves. The reason is, of course,
that the vendor doesn’t want to lose sales of their products to another vendor.
You can understand this happening in a corporate franchised station, but not
stations that are supposed to be independently owned and operated.
Back in the early 1900s after the passage of the FREE ALCOHOL BILL, which
removed the onerous $2+ per gallon tax on the manufacture of alcohol, ethanol
sold at about the same price as gasoline, sometimes less. The ethanol could
be sold at a competitive price because it is inexpensive to produce. It is still
“inexpensive” to produce, although times have obviously changed. If ethanol
could be sold directly to the public there’s ultimately no reason why it wouldn’t
be priced very competitive to gasoline, even if the price per barrel of oil plunged
– that is, as long as the ethanol could be freed from the tether of the oil refiners
and gasoline distributors.
