As the E15 year-round saga drags into its 15th year and stalls again even though we had been told—again—that the oil industry was behind this latest change (after extracting new concessions), I’m reminded of comedian Chris Rock’s bit about the 2003 tiger attack on Roy Horn of the Las Vegas tiger taming duo Siegfried and Roy. Rock would say, “…the tiger bit the man in the head, and everybody's mad at the tiger!? They all say, ‘That tiger went crazy!’ …That tiger ain’t go crazy—that tiger went TIGER! That tiger went crazy when it was riding around on a little bike wearing a Hitler helmet!”
After spending time, political capital, and hundreds of millions of dollars creating misinformation campaigns about ethanol, the RFS, and more recently E15, which has stoked fear and doubt in the minds of fuel retailers and consumers, and after lobbying legislators and regulators to create roadblocks to hamper marketers who saw through their smokescreen, Big Oil telling the ag and ethanol industries they now supported E15 year-round again (after they did and then didn’t), should have been seen as the “tiger riding a bike in a Hitler helmet” that it was. Their earlier proclamation of support for permanent E15 was actually a strategy to avoid (or at least delay) making more expensive RBOB for eight states where Governors opted out of the one-pound summer RVP waiver to get around the ridiculous summer restrictions against E15. Refiners said they were okay with E15—but their “support” didn't get permanent E15 done then, either.
When they’ve professed support for something important to us and those efforts stalled or failed, one would have to believe either Big Oil no longer has any influence in the halls of Congress, or they didn’t support what they said they supported and didn’t put any effort behind passing it. I don’t believe the first thing. Big Oil didn’t go crazy supporting E15 year-round—Big Oil went Big Oil.
As often as we've heard people say, “we need to work with refiners,” I can’t recall a time the ethanol industry got something by doing so. Ethanol wins when elected officials champion legislation and regulations supporting or protecting ethanol in the marketplace—when they fight for farmers, rural economies, lower prices for consumers, and clean air, and against the Big Oil lobby—and we need to support their efforts again.
Meanwhile, ethanol volumes have always grown when our champions on the other end of the fuel supply chain—retailers and wholesalers—fight their oil company suppliers to sell more of our product to consumers in higher ethanol blends—and we’ll continue to help them pull E15 into the marketplace. With politicians pushing, or marketers pulling, or both, we can finally tug E15 year-round over the line. Grab the rope.