New Poll Reveals Record Voter Support for E15

July 13, 2026

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(Renewable Fuels Association) Three-quarters of registered voters support expanding the availability of the lower-cost E15 fuel blend and more than seven in ten back federal legislation allowing its sale year-round, according to a recent survey conducted by Morning Consult for the Renewable Fuels Association. RFA has polled voter opinions on E15 every quarter for the past several years, and the June results represent new record highs for E15 support.

E15 graphic

Only 11 percent of those surveyed expressed opposition to making E15 more widely available and to federal year-round E15 legislation.

“The message from voters is unmistakable: Americans want lower-cost options at the pump, and they see E15 as part of the solution,” said RFA President and CEO Geoff Cooper. “The Senate has a clear opportunity to deliver what voters want by making E15 available year-round, nationwide. The House has already passed year-round E15 legislation, and President Trump has repeatedly called on Congress to make this a priority. Now, it’s time to finish the job of tearing down outdated regulatory barriers and giving families access to a lower-cost, cleaner-burning fuel option when they need it most.”

By Party

Cooper noted that E15 is supported strongly by registered voters in both major parties who responded to the poll. Expanding E15 availability is supported by 75 percent of Republicans and 77 percent of Democrats, and year-round E15 legislation is backed by 73 percent in both parties.

This strong support for higher ethanol blends extends to E85 Flex Fuel as well, with more than two-thirds of voters believing it important for the federal government to promote the production and sale of Flex Fuel Vehicles. Further, 57 percent would be interested in acquiring an FFV as their next vehicle, compared to only 43 percent for electric vehicles.

The poll was conducted by Morning Consult on behalf of RFA. It surveyed 2,039 registered voters from June 23-25. The poll’s margin of error is 2 percent. Click here for an earlier release on additional results from the same survey that showed record support for the Renewable Fuel Standard. And click here for a one-pager polling summary. READ MORE

Related articles

New Poll Reveals Record Voter Support for E15 (DRG Media News Group)
The new fuel at the pump could hurt your car and wallet (Bull Moose Project/Washington Examiner)
STATEMENT: Over 30 Organizations Issue Letter to US Senate Opposing Year-Round Ethanol 'E15' Proposal (World Resources Institute)
My Response to a Simpleton's Argument Against Ethanol (Auto Channel)
E15 and U.S. agriculture: Understanding its role in domestic crop demand (CHS)

Excerpt from World Resources Insitute: A group of over 30 environmental organizations shared the below open letter with the U.S. Senate opposing proposed "year-round E15" legislation that would allow gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol to be sold throughout the year, an increase from the common 10 percent blend.

Letter text:

The undersigned organizations write to express strong opposition to proposals advancing “year-round E15.” On May 13, the House passed legislation which would effectively override key provisions of the Clean Air Act by permitting gasoline blended with 15 percent ethanol (E15) to be sold throughout the year—an increase from the common 10 percent (E10) blend. Given prior indications of Administration support for E15, which could then lead EPA to mandating it, enactment of this legal change could drive a ~50% expansion in ethanol use. This would ultimately lead to higher food and fuel costs for American families, as well as negative impacts on climate and the environment.

Higher Fuel and Food Costs. Although the current average price at the pump for E15 is lower than E10, the cost savings are an illusion. Ethanol’s energy content is one-third lower than that of gasoline, meaning that fuel efficiency of E15 is lower than that of E10, so drivers using E15 have to fill up more often. Wholesale prices of ethanol averaged 66 cents higher than gasoline per gallon between 2007-2025, once adjusting for ethanol’s lower energy content. However, subsidies and low consumer demand have helped keep E15 prices at the pump low.1 In addition, gas stations will need massive investment because E15 is more corrosive—and those costs will likely get passed to consumers to the tune of billions of dollars nationwide. More than 95% of US gas stations do not currently sell E15, and the average upgrade would cost $133,000 per gas station.2 The EPA estimated that even a more modest increase in biofuel use would impose around $41 billion in additional fuel and food costs over a 3-year period.3 The $41 billion includes $24 billion in higher fuel costs, and $17 billion in higher food prices, as elevated corn prices from E15 demand for corn cascade into the many food products that include corn or use it for animal feed (e.g., meat, dairy, poultry). At a time when American families are already confronting elevated costs, year-round E15 would ultimately impose additional burdens both at the pump and at the grocery store, along with huge costs for the businesses that would have to store and sell E15.

Climate and Environmental Impacts. A 50% expansion of ethanol use would require dedicating nearly 13 million additional acres to ethanol4—an area exceeding half the size of Indiana—with serious consequences for climate, natural resources, and wildlife. When Congress enacted the Renewable Fuel Standard in 2007, it required that qualifying biofuels achieve reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. However, a growing body of scientific evidence now indicates that biofuels derived from food and feed crops probably result in higher emissions than conventional fossil fuels. This emerging science led the European Union, which had adopted large biofuel targets, to place much lower caps on crop-based biofuels. Similarly, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Science Advisory Board reported in 2023 that recent estimates of corn ethanol emissions exceed those of gasoline.5 Reflecting these findings, even as the EPA increased biofuel requirements at the direction of the Trump Administration, it declined to conclude that food-based biofuels reduce emissions, even when combined with additional lower-emission biofuels derived from waste.

The emissions associated with corn ethanol stem not only from fossil energy inputs during production—which offset much of its purported benefit—but also from land-use changes. As cropland expands to replace food production diverted to fuel, forests and grasslands get converted to crop production, releasing massive amounts of carbon to the atmosphere.6 All told, land-use changes related to agricultural expansion account for approximately 10 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions.7 In a world where agricultural yield growth is not keeping pace with rising food demands, increasing biofuels requires either increasing hunger8 or exacerbating emissions—neither of which is acceptable.

Beyond climate concerns, crop-based biofuels are associated with a range of additional environmental harms. These include heightened water pollution, increased strain on limited water supplies, and the conversion of millions of acres of valuable wildlife habitat into cropland. Such impacts have been documented extensively in the scientific literature9 and acknowledged by federal agencies.10

Distributional Effects. While EPA has found biofuel policies transfer billions of dollars from consumers to the agricultural sector, the benefits are unevenly distributed. Rising crop prices are quickly reflected in higher land values and rents. Over the past two decades, inflation-adjusted cropland values in states like Iowa have increased by 250%,11 in part due to biofuel demand. Because a majority of farmland in the Corn Belt is leased12—and nearly 80% of that land is owned by non-farming landlords—most of the financial gain accrues to investors rather than working farmers.13

For these reasons, we respectfully urge you to oppose efforts to expand year-round E15 and instead support more effective, sustainable approaches to energy and transportation policy. We should not commit additional land, resources, or taxpayer dollars to policies that increase costs for American families, undermine our climate goals, and strain our natural systems. READ MORE

Excerpt from Auto Channel:

The RFS did no such thing; it mandated that something be used to mitigate the deadly effects of petroleum oil fuels and tetraethyl lead (TEL). It was actually the oil industry that selected ethanol as the ingredient. Several years earlier, when TEL was banned from most engine fuel uses in America, the oil industry by-passed ethanol to replace TEL in favor of MTBE (methyl tert-butyl ether), another poisonous concoction. MTBE is produced by the oil industry from its natural gas and petroleum oil assets. The oil industry chose this garbage because they figured they wouldn't lose money by outsourcing a needed oxygenate to outside interests.

However, within a fairly short period of time, MTBE was banned. The oil industry could have come up with some other garbage to poison the world with, but anything else would have cost them too much, so they - not the government - chose ethanol, which has been their mortal enemy for more than a century. Ethanol has been the oil industry's mortal enemy because it is a superior internal combustion engine fuel and there was no way that they could contain and own a fuel that can be made by anyone anywhere in the world, and it can't be patented.

But, the oil industry did do something they thought clever and to protect themselves from giving up too much to their mortal enemy. Big Oil got their friends in government and the EPA to limit ethanol's volume in every gallon of gasoline to just 10%. The oil industry then backed it's play to ensure the 10% cap by inventing myths such as the "Blend Wall," while also rolling back out the lies that they invented against ethanol decades earlier to frighten the public. If the oil industry did not "own" so many politicians and the EPA, the level of ethanol to be used to correct all the ills of gasoline and diesel fuels could have been - and should have been - much higher.

For example, Brazil has been mandating higher ethanol-gasoline blends for about 25 years before the enactment of the Renewable Fuel Standard. The automobiles driving on the roads in Brazil are the same as the automobiles on the roads in America. Similarly, Great Britain and other European countries regularly allowed (and in some cases, mandated) the use of alcohol-gasoline blends almost a century earlier).

Today, while America is still dicking around with allowing the year-round use of E15, Brazil has upped their mandated internal combustion engine fuels to be E30, and it will probably go up to at least E35 or E40 in the not too distant future.

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Yes, gasoline indeed has a higher BTU (British Thermal Units) rating than ethanol, and that ethanol's BTU rating is approximately 33% lower than gasoline (gasoline is approximately 114,000 BTUs, ethanol is 76,000 BTUs). But, this comparison is misused in two ways, both of which make the claim a bad joke.

First, and foremost, the BTU ratings of gasoline and ethanol have absolutely nothing to do with internal combustion engine (ICE) performance. The BTU rating system was created to measure the capability of fuels (coal, wood, oil, natural gas) used to heat water to power steam engines. Internal combustion engines do not run on steam.

The use of BTU statistics to compare ICE performance was a concoction of the petroleum oil industry; it is meaningless. It is like trying to claim that gasoline is superior to ethanol because it has a prettier color. I completely and irrevocably destroyed the BTU argument several years ago when I wrote and published these three reports:

• The Irrelevance Of BTU Rating - Big Oil's Gimmick To Hoodwink The Public

• The Irrelevance Of BTU Rating - Revisited

• The Reason Why Some Ethanol-Gasoline Blends Outperform E0 in All Engines

The second reason why Meigs and other oil industry-sponsored charlatans or morons are incorrect when they use BTU rating to compare gasoline and ethanol is the "mathematics" of the claim; it literally doesn't add up!

Let's pretend for the moment that there's some energy-content relationship of BTU rating with internal combustion engine MPG performance. In order for the "33% fewer miles" and the "cost profile" suggested by Meigs to have any negative significance, you would have to compare the distinctly separate use of 100% ethanol fuel to ethanol-free gasoline (E0). But this doesn't happen because we use blends. In using E10 or E15, for example, you can't say that the replacement of 10% or 15% volume, respectively, in E10 or E15 magically reduces the blend to 76,000 BTUs.

An E10 blend averages out to about 110,000 BTUs; and an E15 blend averages out to about 108,000 BTUs. This means that E10 does not have 33% fewer BTUs than E0, it has only slightly less than 1% fewer BTUs. Similarly, E15 does not have 33% fewer BTUs than E0, it has just slightly more than 5% fewer BTUs. Therefore, if your automobile gets 20 miles to a gallon of ethanol-free gasoline, then (mathematically) it would get about 19.8 miles to a gallon of E10; and 19 miles to a gallon of E15. In the photo just below from Stillwater Associates (a transportation fuels consulting firm based in Irvine, CA), the price per gallon of 87 octane ethanol-free gasoline is a skosh under $2.54. The price per gallon of 87 octane E10 is 20 cents lower, roughly 8% cheaper. Consequently, if BTU rating comparison meant anything, then I have just shown how the use of an ethanol-gas blend still makes greater sense (while saving many cents) versus the mythical "energy-content" advantage of gasoline. Using an ethanol blend would provide a net gain benefit. READ MORE

Excerpt from CHS: See why E15 matters for U.S. agriculture, from boosting corn demand to supporting ethanol and rural economies.

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Ethanol is a key market for U.S. corn

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Moving from E10 to E15 grows corn demand in the U.S.

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Ethanol also produces feed and fuel byproducts

The ethanol value chain extends beyond fuel. Ethanol production also generates byproducts used in livestock feed and other markets.

The Renewable Fuels Association, a major trade association representing ethanol producers, estimated that U.S. ethanol biorefineries produced more than 35 million metric tons of feed byproducts in 2025, including distillers grains, corn gluten feed and corn gluten meal. These products are used by beef, dairy, swine and poultry producers.

Ethanol production also generates distillers corn oil, which is used in renewable diesel, biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuel and animal feed markets.

What to watch

E15 availability will continue to be shaped by several factors:

Federal and state fuel policy: EPA waivers and state-level fuel rules currently determine where and when E15 can be sold, but if Congress would pass a nationwide year-round E15 law, it would provide more certainty for retailers.
Retail infrastructure investments: Adding E15 as an option at a retail station may require capital investment in compatible storage tanks and dispensers, compliance with labeling requirements and available supply at nearby bulk fuel terminals.
Consumer awareness and education: Drivers need clear information about vehicle compatibility, fuel pricing and product labeling.
Corn supply and ethanol economics: Corn prices, ethanol margins, gasoline demand and export markets all influence ethanol production and demand.
Broader renewable fuels policy: Policies affecting renewable diesel, biodiesel, sustainable aviation fuel and low-carbon fuel markets can also affect demand for agricultural feedstocks, including corn oil and soybean oil.

Bottom line: E15 is good for U.S. farmers

Growth in E15 is important to U.S. farmers because it can expand domestic demand for U.S.-grown corn. The size of that impact depends on consistent policy, retail availability, fuel economics and consumer adoption.

As E15 policy grows in priority for legislators, more retailers offer E15 and more consumers understand when and how to use it, higher ethanol blends can play a larger role in connecting U.S. crop production with domestic energy demand.