It’s Friday and for many the start of the Memorial Weekend holiday is already underway. There is more to celebrate than friends, food and family – savings at the pump due to lower priced ethanol. According to new data, drivers will save nearly 10 cents per gallon if filling up with E10.

According to information from the American Coalition for Ethanol (ACE), ethanol is currently selling for nearly a dollar less than gasoline at the rack, leading to cost savings for ethanol blends at the retail level. According to price data published on May 24 by the Oil Price Information Service (OPIS) E10 is an average of 9.5 cents lower per gallon than straight gasoline. Based on a national average gas price of $2.85 per gallon and calculating the distance AAA expects 28 million travelers to travel, this 9.5 cent discount for E10 could potentially save drivers nearly $95.8 million in savings.

“Every little bit of cost savings helps in a tight economy, and American families are saving money at the pump thanks to the availability of ethanol,” said Ron Lamberty, Vice President / Market Development for ACE, the nation’s largest grassroots ethanol association. “With the wide spread right now between ethanol and gasoline prices, the higher the ethanol content per gallon of your fuel, the higher the savings.”

If E15 were available to drivers nationwide, the savings would be nearly 14 cents per gallon making the total savings for motorists nearly $138 million dollars just over this holiday weekend. The Environmental Protection Agency is expected to make its final ruling on the E15 Waiver this summer.

Other ethanol blended savings included 28.5 cents per gallon less than gasoline for E30 and and E85 is 75 cents less per gallon.

“Motorists deserve to have access to these cost-effective fuels at the pump instead of just being limited by government red tape and Big Oil’s grip on the market,” added Brian Jennings, Executive Vice President of ACE. “We need to give consumers the power to choose whatever fuel is most affordable by making flexible fuel vehicles and blender pumps more widely available.”

U.S. Senators Tom Harkin (D-IA) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) have introduced S. 1627, the Consumer Fuels and Vehicles Choice Act, to increase the number of FFVs and blender pumps nationwide. Currently there are 200 blender pumps and more than 1000 E85 stations across the nation.

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First it was the unprovable Indirect Land Use Change (ILUC) theory. Now ethanol is being challenged by a new “what goes around comes around” hypothesis called the “Global Rebound Effect.”

Earlier this week, the Clean Air Task Force filed suit against the Environmental Protection Agency over the Renewable Fuel Standard for failing “to account for the “global rebound effect” when analyzing the lifecycle greenhouse gas emissions from biofuels.”

This theory goes on the assumption that, “By displacing some gasoline from the US market, the RFS reduces overall demand for petroleum, which in turn leads to lower prices, increased consumption, and higher greenhouse gas emissions in other countries. If EPA had considered the “global rebound effect” in its analysis of different biofuels, only a few of those fuels would have met Congress’s emissions reduction requirements.”

Using this theory, ANY action the United States might take to reduce gasoline consumption – from using more ethanol to increasing vehicle fuel efficiency – will result in INCREASED gasoline use elsewhere in the world. As Renewable Fuels Association president Bob Dinneen puts it, “Whatever environmentalist activists call this new theory, I call it nonsense.”

RFA is is challenging the lawsuit and the whole concept of Global Rebound Effect. “To penalize a technology, any technology, that reduces American oil consumption for any potential oil use in other nations is asinine,” said Dinneen. “Environmentalists are in favor of precious little these days, but by applying their new logic even efforts to improve efficiencies such as gas mileage must suffer a carbon penalty. It simply defies logic.”

That is indeed what the theory says, according to Steven Stoft, founder of the Global Economic Policy Center. In something he wrote last year called, “Corn Whiskey vs. the Climate,” Stoft said, “More ethanol use causes less oil to be imported, which causes a lower world “oil” price, which causes more liquid-fuel use worldwide. This same effect applies to conserving oil as well as to replacing it with ethanol, or even to pumping more oil from Alaska.”

RFA is also challenging the lawsuit claims that EPA is using overly optimistic assumptions about the nature of ethanol production in 2022, implicitly implying little improvement will occur in ethanol production technology between now and then. “To assume that no further innovation will occur in America’s ethanol industry is akin to believing the iPad is the final product from Apple,” said Dinneen.

The case, and RFA’s challenge to it, has been filed with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia.

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Just about a month ago U.S. automakers, the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration and the Environmental Protection Agency — working in coordination with the White House — adopted landmark regulations to relatively quickly raise the average new car fuel efficiency to 35 mpg by 2016. That process took a year to accomplish, but it represented an amazing shift on the part of automakers to lower their resistance to such a national program of emissions and fuel economy regulations… you might even say they were giddy about it.

Over the last year, not only have the automakers embraced the concept of a national program, they’ve been pushing for even higher fuel economy standards in 2017 and beyond. To me, this is truly astounding. And just today, the two federal agencies and automakers got together at the White House to put their money where their mouth is and begin the process of addressing fuel economy and emissions regulations through 2025.

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