This isn’t the first time we’ve seen this, but in April, news broke that the EPA is planning to temporarily expand the sales of greater-than-10% ethanol blends over the summer, meaning E15 (15% ethanol + 85% gasoline) will be available in most areas from the start of June through mid-September.
This kind of decision always entails a balancing act between competing considerations.
On the one hand, ethanol fuel helps American farmers because of the corn that ethanol fuel is made from. It’s also thought that replacing 10 or 15% gasoline (from petroleum) with a home-produced renewable fuel (ethanol from corn) would improve American energy security - a consideration that is not insignificant given the unrest in petroleum-producing areas of the world like Russia/Ukraine and the Middle East.
On the flip side of competing considerations, in years past, E15 wasn’t approved to be sold in the hotter summer weather because it was thought that it increased the amount of ground-level ozone pollution that is a major component of smog. The link is there because ethanol alcohol evaporates more easily than gasoline (and more so in the hotter temperatures of summer), increasing VOC (volatile organic compounds) emissions that contribute to ozone formation.
Two sets of competing considerations, out of which decisions have to be made for or against.
Historically, E15 hasn’t been approved for sale in the summer because of those very concerns about air quality. The EPA has volatility requirements and limits for gasoline that change throughout the year, going up or down based on the cold or hot weather. Cold weather requires gasoline with higher volatility for it to burn optimally in engines during the winter. Hot weather requires dialing down the volatility so you don’t get all the evaporative emissions and VOCs that help form smog.
Naturally, you’d expect there are factions in the US that would prefer as much ethanol to be sold all year round as possible. Recently, and it appears this year, they’re going to get their wish.
You might remember during the Trump Administration, they approved the sale of E15 in the summertime. The Biden Administration continued this, but couched it as a “temporary sale”. The primary impetus for these exceptions was to try and keep gas prices down.
In February, a coalition of governors from Midwest states formally petitioned the Biden Administration to direct the EPA to allow E15 sales for the summer of 2024. And it’s been announced that the Biden Administration approved their petition. The EPA will issue an emergency waiver suspending the normal rules that would have limited E15 sales past June.
Note how we said this process really works. In a situation like this, the rules are created and enforced by specific government agencies. The president, be it Trump, FDR, Biden, Obama, or George Herbert Walker Bush, oversees many of these agencies. If the president wants something to happen that falls under the jurisdiction of one of them, the president will give orders to the agency to do something about it.
In this case, it wasn’t Donald Trump in 2014 or Joe Biden in 2024 throwing the switch for summertime E15. The EPA makes the rules that limit E15 sales, so the president directs the EPA to change the specific rule to allow it, instead.
So it appears that we’ll all be getting a little more corn alcohol at the pump this year.