The southern tier: A new frontier for E85?

It has come to my attention that we are seeing a rapid increase of E85 stations in the deep south, stretching over to the desert southwest. Being almost as far from the corn belt as it gets, coupled with the fact that Texas is known to be oil country, one might not expect this to be an area to find ethanol. Believe it or not, only six states do not have any E85 available at all. These states are Rhode Island, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Hawaii, and Alaska. Last October, I managed to find Connecticut's first E85 pump, at a Shell in Waterford, Connecticut. 44 down, 6 to go!
http://e85vehicles.com/e85/index.php?/topic/6197-connecticut-finally-gets-public-e85/

With that being said, check out this increase in E85 stations in Texas. Texas now has more E85 stations than Nebraska! According to e85prices.com, a crowd-sourced website with users reporting E85 prices and comparing them to the prices of gasoline, Texas has 134 fuel stations that carry E85. Nebraska, a corn belt state, has 91. However, it is important to remember that Texas is a very big state - and Nebraska has far more E85 availability per capita than Texas does.

This next picture does a good job showing the concentration of E85 stations alongside the rough concentration by county of flex fuel vehicles.

Kudos to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory for putting this neat map together! Now to be completely fair, this map uses data from the Alternative Fuels Database for E85 stations (shown here as the blue pins), which is a separate database from e85prices.com.

Here's a key for the shaded counties:
Note: FFV is an acronym for Flex Fuel Vehicle

Yellow: 5 to 45.5 FFVs per 5 square miles
Green: 45.5 to 91 FFVs per 5 sq. miles
Blue: 91 to 139 FFVs per 5 sq. miles
Red: More than 139 FFVs per 5 sq. miles

Correlating almost perfectly with the concentration of flex fuel vehicles is the concentration of E85 stations.

Next, for comparison purposes, here is the map of stations according to the database e85prices.com. You can find this exact map at www.e85prices.com/texas.html.

I also found a Mapco Mart station in Southaven, MS. This is the first station in the Memphis area... even with the high concentration of flex fuels there.

Also worthy of note, is Las Vegas. Yes, Vegas. The city growing so fast it gains something like one person every 7 seconds. Thanks to a regional company called Rebel Oil, E85 is now available at over two dozen retail locations in the Las Vegas metro. E85 is more concentrated there than it is in my hometown of Lansing, Michigan!

In Nevada of all places.

A well-known southern chain called Race Trac is also beginning to add E85 to some of its stores, bringing their total of 0.0% of their stores carrying E85 to at least 0.25%. This is how we now have a station in Ocala, Florida... at least 40 miles from the nearest E85 pump.

So while the battle over the Renewable Fuel Standard continues in Washington, DC, and we continue to see stations add E85 in high numbers up here in the corn belt... let's not forget that E85 is now expanding to the southern tier of states. All the way from San Francisco over to southeast Florida.