SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Standing next to his pickup truck at a service station here, Robert Beck squeezed a yellow nozzle and filled up with the corn-based fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline that car companies, farmers and politicians alike love to promote as a way out of America’s oil addiction.
Mr. Beck, a bearded agronomist who travels throughout the Midwest, likes the idea of E-85, as the fuel blend is known, because it is made mostly from a domestic crop. But he still finds that buying the fuel is almost more trouble than it is worth.
“Everyone talks about it, but exactly where is it?” he said. “You have to have more fuel out there for consumers to buy.’’
That could take a while.
To assess just how efforts to help E-85 catch on were going, a New York Times reporter, accompanied part of the time by a photographer, drove through the region where its popularity is greatest. They found that despite all the good will toward ethanol, success is far from assured.
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SPRINGFIELD, Ill. — Standing next to his pickup truck at a service station here, Robert Beck squeezed a yellow nozzle and filled up with the corn-based fuel blend of 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline that car companies, farmers and politicians alike love to promote as a way out of America’s oil addiction.
