Gas station in edmore mich has e10 for 1.86 which is nice and e85 is $0.86. 1 more penny and the price will match the ethanol content. The station in alex used to be the low price leader. When e10 is $1, e85 will be free.
I assume the “Flex-Fuel” crowd is lining up.
lowell, mich, $0.79. hmm, has the price of corn fallen by 66% this year? or just the pay of the ethanol plant workers?
Good question. Demand must be low. No surprise there.
Are there no taxes on ethanol there?
At $4.00/bushel, just the price of the corn in one gallon of E85 is $1.68…???
(But, the feds and states both have their subsidies. Federal is $0.45/gal. I can’t find any reference to a Michigan subsidy.)
Apparently a major factor is the govt-mandated Renewable Fuel Standard that requires oil companies to sell a certain quantity of ethanol per year. But only a small percentage of vehicles can use E85. Thus there is financial incentive to keep E85 prices low enough so they can sell enough to meet the RFS mandate.
http://harvestpublicmedia.org/article/why-e85-cheapest-gas-pump
"E85 prices are down, not because oil companies want to sell more ethanol, but because they have to.
"The oil companies are in a bind. People are driving less and using less gas, but a federal mandate, called the Renewable Fuel Standard, requires the companies use more ethanol.
"Most gas is already 10 percent ethanol, or E10, and auto manufacturers say that’s as much as most cars should use. That’s why, according to API, Americans only use enough gas to consume 13.3 billion gallons of ethanol, about 10 percent of the fuel supply. But this year the RFS requires oil companies to use 13.8 billion gallons of corn-based ethanol, and that number is scheduled to keep rising.
"That has many in the oil industry fuming.
“It’s an unrealistic mandate to blend more ethanol than can be used safely,” said Bob Greco of the American Petroleum Institute (API). “It’s not a problem with the ethanol itself. It’s an issue with the mandate.”
The above article was from 2013. But strangely, EPA has effectively suspended the ethanol quota requirement for 2014:
"In a draft rule released a year ago, the EPA said it would require blending 15 billion to 15.52 billion gallons of renewable fuels such as corn ethanol and biodiesel in 2014, down from 18.15 billion gallons set in the 2007 legislation. A final proposed rule was sent by the agency to the White House and was forecast to slightly increase that quota, although the proposal hadn’t been made public.
“The EPA justified that cut by saying ethanol was bumping up against a so-called blend wall, or the maximum amount of the fuel that could be mixed into the gasoline supply without damaging engines. Ethanol producers say the blend wall is an imaginary creation of refiners – whose products are displaced the renewables – and threatened to sue if EPA finalized that rule.”
So it’s turned into a food fight between EPA, ethanol producers, and the oil companies over what the ethanol quota should be.
No place to but e85 out here…no place to buy pure gasoline either.
We get what we’re given, i believe it’s e10 stuff.
Anyway…my half tank 50 dollars just filled up my beast 
We supposedly have ONE gas station in NH (some place in Manchester) that sells E85. But we have a lot of flex-fuel pick-ups driving around.
maybe i could rig up a fuel oil burner furnace to run on e85? it could be cheaper than natural gas? its cold today, -5f. brr.
I guess you could rig up a burner, but even if it worked I’d worry about the E85 degrading over the summer. And you’d use a lot more gallons, diesel has about 50% more BTUs per gallon. You’d also have to worry about explosive ethanol vapors, much more than for diesel.
get a liquid cooled generator. route the coolant lines thru a heat exchanger like they use in a solar powered hot water storage tank system. the generator makes electricity and i use the heat for the hot water storage tank.
“it could be cheaper than natural gas?”
It’s close on a gross BTU basis, but a 95% efficient gas furnace would still be cheaper than a 70% efficient e85 furnace.
I am not driving to Michigan for cheap e85. It’s 0.97 in Alex today. 53% cheaper than e10.
The reason you see so many flex-fuel pickups (and cars) in areas without E85 being offered, is that the vehicle manufacturers got credit toward reaching their CAFE mileage standards for every flex-fuel vehicle they sold. Didn’t matter if the engines never saw a drop of E85, or E10 for that matter.