ACE Hopes to Help Grow Mexico’s Ethanol Market

by Matt Thompson (Ethanol Producer Magazine) Fresh off a trip to Mexico to tout the benefits of ethanol to retailers, the American Coalition for Ethanol’s Senior Vice President Ron Lamberty said interest in ethanol among the country’s retailers is piqued. Lamberty was in Mexico City presenting at a workshop hosted by the U.S. Grains Council and the Mexican Association of Service Station Suppliers (AMPES), and said that in recent years, AMPES has been fielding more questions from station owners about adding E10 to their offerings.

One reason interest has increased recently is the price of ethanol compared to gasoline in Mexico. “It is clear that there’s a huge financial advantage to using ethanol, specifically in Mexico compared to prices there. There’s been a huge price advantage, so there’s been a lot of interest in ethanol for that reason, too,” he said.

His trip to Mexico City was the last in a series of six workshops Lamberty attended in Mexico during 2018. The hope is that with increased interest from retailers, Mexico becomes a larger export market for U.S. ethanol. He said that currently, if all retailers in Mexico started selling E10, the market would be about 1.2 billion gallons. “It’s not huge, but it’s pretty big,” he said.

Mexican retailers would sell E10, which much of the infrastructure is already set to handle.

"... It’s doable, but it’s a change in mindset,” he said, adding that until recently, the petroleum industry in Mexico was controlled by the government.

One of the challenges with selling ethanol in Mexico, Lamberty said, is distributing it throughout the country. Much of the ethanol sold in Mexico is preblended in the U.S. near the border and shipped to Mexican stations, also near the border.

“The approach we always take with market development is, get somebody in the market selling your products. The competitors will either have to concede or figure out how they can do it too, and they usually do the latter,” he said. READ MORE