In Pursuit of Pure: The Quest to Make E85 a Totally Biobased Fuel

by Melissa Anderson (Ethanol Producer Magazine) San Diego-based Pearson Fuels is showing its wholesale customers that E85 can be made almost entirely from biobased inputs using ethanol and renewable naphtha. The demand is there, but will the latter ingredient become available at scale?

Gas prices are high in California. Very high. But Pearson Fuels is helping drivers reach their destination without breaking the bank, while helping the planet at the same time. The majority of Pearson’s products are found at the pumps of its wholesale customers—branded retail stations and a handful of independents that are currently selling a lot of E85 in Southern California—some of which is now made with a special, all-bio blend.

Doug Vind, a managing member of Pearson Fuels, tells Ethanol Producer Magazine that a small percentage of Pearson’s E85 is now being blended with renewable naphtha, a coproduct of renewable diesel production that not only provides some cost relief but reduces the fuel’s carbon intensity. In other words, the incentive to blend ethanol with renewable naphtha is not only a strategy for lowering blending costs but also producing a lower-carbon ethanol-based retail fuel—and one of the only pure biofuels available for retail sale in the U.S. It’s one of those rare instances when eco-friendly and economical converge.

“We are blending it up and creating an E85 where the 15 percent component is renewable naphtha,” Vind says. “It blends very well, and we’re just happy as can be. We would love to do more.”

That is, they’d like to get more naphtha—and the right kind. Producers of renewable diesel have a sizeable incentive to get their renewable naphtha to the West Coast, from qualifying for RINs to credits for LCFS-qualifying low-carbon fuels. There are hinderances though, as not all renewable naphtha can go straight into ethanol. Vind explains that the product’s suitability as an E85 ingredient depends on how its parent product, renewable diesel, is made. Different refining processes result in significantly different coproduct. That variability, and just finding enough of the right naphtha, makes it a still questionable blending agent for E85.

“We are going to try place renewable naphtha everywhere in our E85 system because California likes it,” Vind says. “It’s consistent with their low-carbon policies. It keeps us in the game because, while we used to just compete against regular unleaded, we now have to compete, from a policy standpoint, with the electrification movement.”

The easiest way for ethanol to compete against the past (fossil fuels) and future (EVs) is to be as renewable as possible and provide liquid fuel consumers with an ultra-low carbon bridge fuel. The demand is there, ethanol is abundant, but renewable naphtha is still not. While Pearson had initially been able to blend about 40 percent of its E85 output with naphtha, it had had to cut back as the supply couldn’t keep up with demand at their customers’ pumps.

But it can perhaps go one step further, not only playing the role of hydrocarbon in E85 blends, but eventually becoming an authorized denaturant for ethanol. That’s a move Vind strongly supports as a way of making the E85 a truly renewable fuel.

Pearson Fuels is using renewable naphtha strategically, stretching its limited supply as far as possible, and waiting for the forthcoming wave of production as naphtha becomes a more ubiquitous byproduct of increasing renewable diesel production. As that happens, Vind firmly believes E85 is a tailor-made product and ideally suited for a long-term pairing with the biobased input.

The Renewable Fuels Association has been working behind the scenes to get the first piece in place to make renewable naphtha a major coproduct rather than an afterthought of the renewable diesel industry. Kelly Davis, vice president of regulatory affairs at the RFA, shared that a technical committee of the association submitted a notification to the Tax and Trade Bureau in April, requesting renewable naphtha be added to the authorized materials of denaturants for ethanol to be used for fuel.

“When we ran all the chemistry data relative to the renewable naphtha, some of them were quite different. We do think that we will have to do something very similar to natural gasoline and request a certain specification. It will be broad ranging, it won’t exclude very much, but it will have to have a specification on the renewable naphtha to make it acceptable for our use.”

As soon as Davis gets the specifications set, the RFA plans to introduce renewable naphtha as the hydrocarbon capable of meeting ASTM standards for flex fuel. Doing this technical legwork is expected to pay off in states like California where low carbon fuel standards would give all-renewable E85 a major premium. From there, the business-to-business work of using the naphtha in ethanol begins. READ MORE