Is This E85's Time To Shine?

The recent fall in fuel prices isn’t just an opportunity for Americans to demonstrate their collective inability to remember the events of even the recent past; it’s also a decisive hammerblow to E85 plants and retailers across the country.

This has to be the case, right?

Well, it’s certainly the tack that the media has been taking over the past month, with most media outlets reporting significant drops in E85 consumption as “natural gasoline” falls below the $2 mark in many markets. Certainly, gasoline is lower in terms of inflation-adjusted pricing than it’s been in decades. I filled up my Accord the other day from below the “E” mark for a price of $30.20, obtaining 421 mixed-use miles from the resulting fillup. Each mile is costing me about six cents in fuel, compared to the approximately twenty cents per mile I paid to operate my Town Car eighteen months ago.

As fate would have it, however, the very thing that causes opponents of E85 to decry its assistance is allowing it to deliver some fairly staggering pricing. The “consensus opinion” is that a gallon of petroleum energy creates between 1.24 and 1.6 gallons of corn-based E85. Other base crops like sugar cane and switchgrass can offer much higher yields, but fundamentally when we think “ethanol” in the United States we think about corn-based ethanol. When the cost of petroleum drops, therefore, it has a massive effect of the cost of ethanol production.

Long-time TTAC readers will remember that I ran my now-deceased Town Car on E85 for some time and observed lower fuel economy, some stumbling, and skanky behavior as a result. At the time, E85 was $2.29 and gasoline was $2.79, numbers that didn’t quite work for E85.

What about $1.19 vs. $1.89? That’s a much bigger (62% vs. 82%) gap, and it’s courtesy of Michigan’s Yellow Hose Program. Gasoline hasn’t been that cheap since before Nixon. Seeing $1.19 on a fuel station sign, or even seeing the $1.36 that my local Kroger is asking for E85, is psychologically important, and we’re a country that runs on stuff like that.

I’m not going to fill up my not-quite-Super-Coupe with E85; it’s the one modern Honda that can’t handle the juice even with an adapter. Still, the numbers on E85 are now good enough that municipalities might consider filling their flex-fuel cars from the yellow hose, and corporations might follow. I’m also considering building a NASA race car that runs exclusively on E85. If I do that, look for future E85 reports from this writer to have much more factual data and much less descriptions of vodka spilled between someone’s legs, okay?