My high school coaxed a legendary area football coach out of retirement when I was a player many, many years ago, and when he was asked how he and his old playbook would match up against the younger coaches, Coach Burns answered, “Hell, I've forgotten more about football than any of those guys know.”
At the time, in addition to being funny, I thought it was badass. The older I get, however, the more I realize it was probably just a statement of fact, and maybe a realization he’d have to teach things he hadn’t thought about in a long time.
Several years later, in the first peewee football game I coached, one of my players tackled a ballcarrier by jumping up and grabbing his face mask with both hands. As the kid got up to celebrate his tackle, I yelled at him, “You can't do that!” He looked at me, stunned and about to cry, and it struck me this third grader had no idea grabbing the facemask was illegal – because his idiot coach (me) knew it for so long I had forgotten some people wouldn’t.
Fast forward to an example actually having something to do with ethanol market development: About 20 years ago at a regional fuel trade show, the owner of an Indiana c-store chain came to the ACE booth to tell me they were now offering 10% ethanol blends. I thanked him and asked what took so long and how much it cost us. He answered, “That’s why I came over here, and it was about a nickel a gallon!”
Until the early 2000s, ethanol usually cost 20-40 cents per gallon (cpg) more than gasoline, making the 10% blend wholesale rack price 2-4 cpg higher than unleaded. However, E10 got a federal blenders tax credit of about a nickel, keeping its net price a couple cents below unleaded.
A few months before that trade show, ethanol prices dropped below gas, and E10 was a penny cheaper than unleaded – even before the tax credit, and the Indiana guy told his fuel manager to put E10 in all the stores. The manager agreed it was a great idea, with E10 six cents cheaper than unleaded, and the boss snapped, “I know! That's why I told you to do it! Get going!” Then he turned to a friend sitting in his office and said, “Six cents? I see a penny. Where'd he get another nickel?” The boss didn’t know about the ethanol blender's tax credit – because idiot ethanol people (like me) knew about it for so long, we'd forgotten some people didn’t. He’d stopped by our booth to say, “You should tell people about that…” I had scads of spreadsheet “calculators” showing how the credit worked, but thought everyone knew…
All this to point out we’re adding an E15 blend calculator for marketers on flexfuelforward.com, and to remind people who read this – we all know so much about this product we make, sell, blend, or buy, don’t assume others know what you know (you know what happens when you assume… It’s another coach story – Google it).