E-15 fuel in your area?

[mo1]

I haven't seen it around me. It seems to be a resoundingly bad idea. Our Kohler engine distributor reiterated that it was not suitable in OPE.

E15​

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) defines E15 as gasoline blended with 10.5% to 15% ethanol. In 2011, EPA approved E15 for use in light-duty conventional vehicles of model year 2001 and newer, through a Clean Air Act waiver request, based on significant testing and research funded by the U.S. Department of Energy. Stations are not required to sell E15, but some have started offering E15 due to state and federal incentives for upgrading equipment and better profit margins when compared with regular gasoline. E15 is available in 30 states at just over 2,400 stations. E10 remains the limit for passenger vehicles older than model year 2001 and for other non-road and small engines and vehicles that use gasoline, such as lawn mowers, motorcycles, and boats.

Vehicles approved for E15 use:

• Flexible fuel vehicles
• Conventional vehicles of model year 2001 and newer.

Vehicles prohibited from using E15:

• All motorcycles
• All vehicles with heavy-duty engines, such as school buses and delivery trucks
• All off-road vehicles, such as boats and snowmobiles
• All engines in off-road equipment, such as chain saws and gasoline lawn mowers
• All conventional vehicles older than model year 2001.

There are additional regulations for stations selling blends above E10. For more information, visit the Codes, Standards, and Safety page.

Alternative Fuels Data Center: E15

Quite a few stations around here have this fuel. Anything with ethanol in it can be quite variable based on what the gasoline base stock is and how it is blended. Typically around here E15 is sold out of a three-nozzled non-blender pump from its own dedicated tank, and the fuel is 15% ethanol added to 84 octane base gasoline to yield an 88 octane product. The other two nozzles on the pump are for road diesel and 87/89/premium gasoline or E85 and 87/89/premium gasoline.

All non-premium (octane <91) grades of gasoline here must have at least 10% ethanol. 91+ octane can be ethanol-free. Anything under 87 octane is illegal. If I remember correctly, any ethanol blend between 10 and 85% is legal to sell.

- Regular unleaded here is 84 octane base stock with 10% ethanol added for an 87 octane gasoline.
- Mid-grade unleaded here is 86 octane base stock with 10% ethanol added for an 89 octane gasoline.
- About 2/3 of premium is 88 octane base stock with 10% ethanol added for a 91 octane gasoline. The rest consists of E10 blends with higher octane base gasolines to yield 92 or 93 octane, and 91 or 93 octane no-ethanol gasoline.

E85 is fairly common around here, but blender pumps and thus concentrations other than the pre-mixed E15 and E85 (such as E20/E30/E40/E50) are rare. They are more common the farther into the corn belt you get. Yesterday when I was out regular unleaded was $4.499/gallon and E85 was $3.099/gallon. E15 has always been a dime a gallon less than regular unleaded.

Fuel mileage on the 10% and 15% ethanol blends are essentially indistinguishable from no-ethanol gasoline in any vehicle I have had as far as mileage is concerned. Mileage will drop about two miles per gallon if I run E85, from about 15-16 mpg to 13-14 mpg. However, the engine runs a whole lot better on E85 than it does on regular unleaded, particularly with towing- it runs similarly to using premium unleaded.

The advantage of ethanol is that it is about as safe and inexpensive of a way to add octane as we've yet found. Add a little and it's like you added 115 octane gasoline to the base gasoline. Add a bunch and it's a little less of an octane boost, E85 is generally noted to be around 105 octane or so depending on application. Ethanol doesn't have the toxicity and deposits issues that tetraethyllead did, it doesn't have the pollution issues with adding a bunch of aromatics like benzene does, isn't limited to only a small increase in octane such as with MMT, and won't foul groundwater at tiny concentrations like MTBE did. (Ethanol also has a little higher blending octane than MTBE.) Methanol could also work well here too as it has even higher octane than ethanol and is less expensive, but it is highly toxic and more corrosive than ethanol, plus has a lower energy density, which may be some of the reasons why the longer-chain alcohol is more often used.

Disadvantages are that particularly at higher concentrations it isn't long-term compatible with some certain rubbers, metals, and plastics; it is hygroscopic; it has lower energy density than gasoline, so you will use more of it; and it has a lower vapor pressure at high concentrations than gasoline so starting in cold weather can be more difficult (this is why E85 becomes E70 or E51 in the winter.)