Poll puts E15 support at 75% as Senate returns with a thinner Republican majority
A Morning Consult poll done for the Renewable Fuels Association found 75% of registered voters support expanding access to E15, and about 70% back federal legislation making year-round sales permanent. The survey covered 2,039 registered voters from June 23 to June 25. It lands as the Senate comes back from the Fourth of July recess with a year-round E15 bill still sitting in front of it.
Watch the Senate math more than the poll. Republicans are down a vote after the death of Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., over the weekend, and there are questions about Sen. Mitch McConnell's health. A bill that already needed floor time now has to get it from a chamber counting heads more carefully than it was two weeks ago.
What year-round E15 means at the pump
Retailers who blend E15 have been living on annual emergency waivers, which means every spring you find out in April or May whether you can keep selling the product you already plumbed and labeled for. Permanent authority ends that. If you have not built for E15, the calculus changes too: a stable federal rule is what makes the tank and dispenser spend pencil out over a normal payback period rather than a one-summer gamble.
Nothing has passed. Voter support polls well on plenty of bills that never get a vote, and RFA commissioned this one, so read it as advocacy with a real number attached rather than a whip count.
EIA trims 2026 ethanol, raises 2027
In the Short-Term Energy Outlook released July 7, EIA cut its forecast for 2026 fuel ethanol production and raised the 2027 number. It is a modest signal, and it points at the same thing the E15 fight does: near-term blending demand is capped by what the law allows in summer, and the outer years assume that loosens.
Greenfield and Show Me Ethanol
Greenfield Global and Show Me Ethanol announced an exclusive long-term supply agreement on July 7. High-purity alcohol is a separate market from fuel ethanol, and gallons a plant sends there are gallons it does not send into the gasoline pool.
Propane tractors
LP Gas Magazine makes the case that propane tractors could come back. For propane marketers already running autogas, farm equipment is an adjacent load on the same truck routes. Worth watching if you have ag customers, though nothing here suggests volume yet.
What to watch
Whether the E15 bill gets floor time before the August recess, and who carries it now that the Senate is short a vote. Also watch whether EPA signals anything on a 2026 summer waiver. If a permanent fix stalls again, E15 retailers are back to depending on that waiver next May.
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The only change: the appositive "the Missouri high-purity alcohol producer" is gone from the Greenfield/Show Me Ethanol line. The sentence that follows already establishes that high-purity alcohol is a separate market, so the clause was explaining a term the reader was about to get anyway. Everything else is untouched.