The 85 percent ethanol, 15 percent gasoline blend E85 is available at close to 1,150 U.S. filling stations, 90 of them in Indiana, according to the E85 advocacy group the National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition.
That's just a fraction of the estimated 200,000 stations nationwide.
More than half of those are operated by major oil producers, who have not embraced E85 sales, National Ethanol Vehicle Coalition executive director Phillip Lampert said.
"That's a big hurdle to overcome," Lampert said.
Al Mannato, fuels issues manager for the American Petroleum Institute, said Exxon Mobil, Shell, Marathon and the other oil companies the institute represents aren't the ones shunning E85.
"It's the consumers who have turned a cold shoulder to E85," Mannato said.
Mannato said car buyers are turned off by ethanol's fuel efficiency, which is between 25 percent and 30 percent lower than gasoline's.
"Unless E85 is priced at 25 to 30 percent less than gasoline, a consumer is not going to go the same amount of miles on the same amount of dollars, and they understand that," Mannato said.
The big oil companies last year used 5.4 billion gallons of ethanol as a gasoline additive, Mannato said.
It is only when ethanol can be produced in much greater volumes, beyond 14 million gallons a year -- through processing of corn stalks, wood chips, grasses and other cellulosic substances available in larger volumes than corn -- that higher blends of ethanol will become cost competitive, Mannato said.
Nevertheless, sales of E85 have picked up from last year at the rate of about 25 percent at a string of four Gas City stations in Northwest Indiana, Gas City district manager JoEllen Jostef said.
Prices for the blend have ranged from 30 cents to 40 cents below regular unleaded gasoline, said Jostef, whose chain was the first to begin selling E85 locally.
Gas City stations in Hobart and St. John are among the top sellers locally, at between 300 to 500 gallons of E85 a day, she said, while some Gas City stores in Illinois sell up to 1,000 gallons a day.
"I think sales will continue to grow as more and more people get familiar with it," Jostef said.
Sales of E85 held at about a 1,000 gallons a month at the Wilco County Market in Lowell when the fuel center first opened just over a year ago.
But since then, "we are seeing tremendous growth in this category," said Linda Armstrong, Wilco-County Market president.
"Our E85 volume has easily doubled in the past six months," Armstrong said.
The point to make about E85 is that "it is not a flash in the pan," said Gus Olympidis, president and chief executive officer of the Valparaiso based Family Express chain of 48 stores, which sell E85 at stations in Porter and LaPorte counties locally.
"This is the very beginning of a very long journey realigning our energy exposure to the world," Olympidis said.
"This is the first inning. We've got a long way to go."
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