Problems Plague U.S. Flex-Fuel Fleet

Tonya Jackson, a Postal Service worker, fills up her flex-fuel vehicle at the Brentwood facility in Washington. (By Dayna Smith For The Washington Post)

To remedy this, legislation passed in 2005 requires agencies to seek an exemption or waiver from the Energy Department for each flex-fuel vehicle it owns or leases that is more than five miles or 15 minutes from the closest ethanol station. (Agencies also can seek exemptions if E85 costs at least 15 percent more than standard gasoline. No such waivers have been requested this fiscal year.)

Sixty-one percent of the fleet -- more than 67,000 vehicles -- received waivers for 2008-2009, the second year data were reported.

Five percent of the exemptions are in the Washington region. In Maryland and Virginia, nearly 1,000 exemptions were granted, with vehicles from the Postal Service, Army, Navy and Department of Agriculture leading the way. As in many other East Coast areas where E85 stations are rare, most vehicles qualified on the basis of being too far from a pump.

The waivers did offer a valuable tool: Zip code locations for each exempted vehicle that could be fed into an Energy Department database and shared with companies that build fuel stations.

The data, however, do not identify the location of the other 39 percent of the flex-fuel fleet for which it is a struggle to find E85, an important problem to solve because these vehicles use the fuel 8 percent of the time.

It is also unclear whether vehicles granted waivers are truly too far from the E85 stations to use them. The Post analysis, comparing locations of exempted vehicles with E85 fueling stations, shows that 13 percent of the vehicles are within five miles of publicly available ethanol pumps.

In the District, 50 of the 54 exemptions are for vehicles that are less than five miles from an E85 supplier, The Post found.

Some exempted vehicles are in the Midwest, where E85 stations are abundant, ethanol prices are lower than national averages for ethanol, and traffic is comparatively light.

In Omaha, 43 exempted vehicles owned by the Army, Postal Service and Department of Veterans Affairs are within five miles of a Cubby's food store, Fantasy's Food-N-Fuel or Bucky's Express -- all with E85 pumps.

In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, 20 flex-fuel vehicles owned by the Postal Service, the General Services Administration and the Department of Homeland Security won exemptions, although they are within five miles of an ethanol pump.

And in Manhattan, Kan., the Army and the Departments of Agriculture and the Interior have 18 vehicles within five miles of one E85 station at the Farmers Cooperative Association.

"We put the station in thinking that if government employees had the vehicles, they were supposed to use ethanol,'' said Darin Marti, general manager of the Farmers Cooperative. "It's not hard to find us. You can use a GPS unit, and it will take you right to us. And we have big signs along the highway."

Energy Department officials said some agencies may have secured waivers because of other factors, including stations that do not accept a government credit card or that have unreliable E85 supplies. In urban areas such as Washington, exemptions were typically granted because traffic congestion made even a two- or three-mile drive costly and time-consuming.

The GAO said its analysis showed that future improvements will rely on better data. And it is time for government to reassess the original vision for the fleet, the agency said.

"It can be a role model, a leader," said Gaffigan, of the GAO. "And it should."