Despite having opened the nation’s first E85 retail location several years earlier, in the fall of 2000, when ACE hired me from my previous life in the fuel business for their newly created market development program, I didn’t think much of E85. That’s not to say I thought it was an inferior fuel—I just didn’t think about it very often. Nationally, about 1.5 billion gallons of ethanol was being sold in the United States, mostly in the Midwest, and job one (and jobs two through 10, really) was to get to other parts of the country and talk to fuel marketers about ethanol, E10, and the blender's tax credit. Help them to “Do the Math" and realize they could lower their fuel cost, crush their competitors, take their customers, and make more money. The bottom line was E10 could be used in 200 million vehicles and could help retailers make more money.
By comparison, there were about a hundred stations offering E85, and just under a million registered flex-fuel vehicles (FFVs) at the time. Most of the FFVs were owned by government entities and fueled at private fleet fueling facilities. And most of the retail stations were like the ones I “built” by essentially taking out one of the fuels we sold at the location and putting E85 in its place (we could sell E85 in regular gas pumps until around 2008). E85 gained more of our attention from 2000 to 2010, when, with the help of the Renewable Fuel Standard and incentives to automakers to sell alternative fuel vehicles, the number of FFVs on the road rose to 11 million, and 2,300 stations sold E85, some blending it with regular to make better margins on E10. Those numbers increased until there were more than 25 million FFVs on the road and almost 5,000 stations around 2020.
Flash forward to today, and there are similarities with E15 being “job one”—a mostly Midwest fuel, national legislation should give it a boost—and people don’t think much about E85 today—not just because E15 is the priority—some because they no longer believe E85 is realistic—and that’s a mistake.
California’s legalization of E15 last year was widely celebrated—with good reason. Not as many people are aware of AB 2046 in California, which would legalize EPA-approved flex fuel conversion kits in the state and could put hundreds of thousands more FFVs on California’s highways. Last year, California alone sold 115 million gallons of E85, which is 84 million gallons more ethanol annually than if those drivers used E10. By comparison, the additional 5% ethanol in 1.5 billion gallons of E15 sold in the entire United States last year is 75 million new gallons. E15 is gaining traction, but we need to support and help develop other potentially huge markets.