ST. PAUL -- The Minnesota attorney general continues to look into why ethanol-based E85 fuel prices kept pace with gasoline's rapid price increase four months after he began to seek documents from the ethanol industry.
Attorney General Mike Hatch began asking question in mid-September about why a fuel with 85 percent corn-based ethanol would increase at the same rate as gasoline. At the time, soaring gasoline prices were blamed on Hurricane Katrina knocking out Gulf Coast refineries.
Hatch "had to threaten legal action" to get documents from the ethanol industry, spokeswoman Leslie Sandberg said. After the threat, the industry turned over documents Hatch requested, and his staff is reviewing them, Sandberg added.
"The companies are all 'lawyered up'," she quoted Hatch as saying. "That tends to slow down the process."
When he began checking the situation, Hatch said he did not understand why E85 prices should rise so much when corn prices stayed the same.
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"Everybody points fingers at everybody else," Hatch said at the time.
Legal experts said the only way the ethanol industry could have broken a law was to conspire to increase prices, but industry observers said they saw no evidence of that.
Hatch said merely examining the prices could help the situation. When he began, E85 typically cost 20 cents to 70 cents less a gallon than gasoline. The American Lung Association reports the current difference about Minnesota is even less today, between 15 cents and 40 cents.
The difference between E85 and gasoline prices "tend to be all across the board," Bob Moffitt of the American Lung Association Minnesota chapter said.
E85 is available in nearly 200 stations around the state, far more than in any other state. It is used in "flexible fuel" vehicles designed to run on anything from pure gasoline to E85, which has 85 percent ethanol and 15 percent gasoline.
