Blends
IN PURSUIT OF PURE
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? By Melissa Anderson
Gas prices are high in California. Very high. But Pearson Fuels is help-
ing 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 16 | ETHANOL PRODUCER MAGAZINE | JULY 2022
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
