Recent fuel industry news has included a heavy rotation of sob stories from small “merchant” refiners and larger oil companies that own larger, outdated, inefficient refineries, bleating about their woes being caused by the Renewable Fuels Standard, and more specifically, high RIN prices. As a fuel retailer, you’ve no doubt heard some of this whining and figured somehow, like everything else refiners…

ACE's Market Development will be taking part in our first in-person petroleum marketer trade show in 16 months when we set up the booth at the Southwest Fuel and Convenience Expo in Fort Worth, Texas, June 6-8. Five other “non-virtual” trade shows are on the books for the remainder of 2021.

These conferences and tradeshows are important for us to share the latest information about storing…

Do you really want to offer unleaded E15 to your customers? I mean, if cost were no object, would you like to at least have the option to offer higher octane unleaded E15 – usually selling for about a nickel a gallon less than the traditional lowest priced 10 percent ethanol blend sold everywhere? If so, good news. The cost of offering unleaded E15 (or unleaded88 or regular88, or whatever…

One of the greatest frustrations I’ve had over the past 20+ years of helping fuel marketers add higher ethanol to their product slate has been trying to convince station owners they really, truly, not just saying this because I’m an ethanol guy, can store and sell E15 using their existing equipment. The anti-ethanol misinformation campaign, which convinced station owners E15 required all new fueling…

If you’re a station owner who has been considering offering E15 (or higher ethanol blends), you should know the price of ethanol is much higher than it was this time last year, there are no federal grant programs to pay you for adding new equipment, and the time to start offering E15 could not be better.

If you’re not already numb to phrases like “year-end clearance,” “year-end closeout," or any of the other too loud, too-good-to-be-true sales that have been screamed about in ads for the last month, there is one more you should take a look at if you are a fuel station owner. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Higher Blends Infrastructure and Incentive Program has some money left over, and they…

December finally got here! This year – which at times seemed like it would never end – will be coming to an end in a few days. It would be nice to think the end of the year would also mark the end of all the difficulties and weirdness we’ve encountered in 2020. If “2020 hindsight” only means we are done with 2020 and get to watch it get smaller in our rearview mirrors, that would be comforting.…

Most fuel marketers aren’t currently waiting to find out if they’re going to get part of the $100 million in Higher Blends Infrastructure Incentive Program (HBIIP) matching grant money that will begin being awarded any day now by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). If you are one of the 121 applicants waiting to hear from USDA, good luck! We hope you get good news soon, and thanks for making…

The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Higher Blends Infrastructure Incentive Program (HBIIP) closed its application window August 13. In the months following USDA’s announcement of the program in May, ACE launched a series of short fuel-marketer focused video tutorials with USDA program staff walking through the application process and simplifying it so retailers could fill out the application…

In May, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) announced a program to help pick up the tab for biofuel infrastructure called the Higher Blends Infrastructure Incentive Program (HBIIP). The program makes $100 million dollars available to fuel retailers and pays up to 50 percent of the cost of buying and installing new equipment or upgrading existing equipment to sell E15 and flex fuels like E85.…