It’s All about RON

by Ron Lamberty (Ethanol Producer Magazine) ... Ethanol’s high octane value is important and valuable, and it’s a part of most math and money discussions I regularly have with fuel station owners. In market conditions like we’re seeing today, as ethanol’s traditional price advantage versus gasoline shrinks, retailers need to be reminded to emphasize the higher octane of ethanol blends. Our industry is experiencing an octane lovefest of late, and even recent petroleum marketer events I’ve attended have talked about higher octane demand for future fuels. And we’re all talking about octane because the automotive world is talking about octane. Ethanol’s octane and a collection of other fuel chemistry advantages interest automakers as they develop vehicles that meet future government standards, running on a high-efficiency, “super-premium,” a 98 RON or 100 RON fuel.

In the U.S., when we use the term octane, we refer to the anti-knock index (AKI) of a fuel. AKI is calculated by adding RON and the motor octane number (MON) and dividing by two. That’s the (R+M)/2 equation you see on AKI octane stickers in the United States. RON is higher than MON or AKI, and in most of the world, owners’ manuals, gas caps and octane stickers on fuel dispensers all use RON to express a fuel’s octane rating.

And that’s how we should label midlevel ethanol blends, with each blend’s RON rating.

While the FTC decided not to require octane rating as part of the midlevel or high-level ethanol blend rating rule, the ruling did not prohibit posting an octane rating. There are references to earlier octane rules that talked about ethanol’s high octane ratings confusing and misinforming customers (Really? Where has FTC been as the oil industry continues to confuse and misinform everyone about E15 and the RFS?), and that’s why the ethanol industry shouldn’t use AKI labels. We’ll embrace RON.

Yeah, RON gives midlevel ethanol an unfair advantage—one we should absolutely use. And we will do so, properly. FTC says retailers “must possess a reasonable basis, consisting of competent and reliable evidence,” of the octane rating on a fuel dispenser, so we will have RON checked out by approved testing labs before we start putting RON stickers on dispensers across the nation. And then the RON age can begin. READ MORE