Just the other day I got a call from a dealer in the Northeast who’s seeing some serious engine failures among his customers due to ethanol. He said he’s been testing some of the fuel his customers have brought in, and he’s routinely finding ethanol contents in the 15% range and sometimes as high as 20%.
It’s against this backdrop that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is working to respond to a request by an ethanol industry group to raise the ethanol content in standard retail transportation gasoline by 50%—from 10% to 15%, with the goal of making E15 the most common gasoline sold at service stations nationwide.