The rise of Underdog people and their Underdog fuels: The small town and E85

News arrives from Washington state that Propel Fuels has E85 expansion underway and a new outlet has opened in the Yakima Valley town of Wapato. Also, the company announced a new regional office in White Salmon, along the north side of the Columbia River at the only vehicle between Portland and The Dalles.

You might ask “why Wapato?” or “why is this a big deal?” and, today, let’s explore the answers.

First of all, some background for those new to E85, America’s underdog fuel. It offers a simple value proposition to its fans: a 100 octane experience for a fraction of the price of 93 octane fuel. Also does well on carbon intensity compared to the fossilians.

About that discount

Right now, AAA is reporting prices of $4.425 for premium for $2.95 for E85, and that puts E85 at a 33 percent discount to super while the mileage dips 20-25 percent according to Edmunds. So, you pay $3.54-$3.69 to go the same distance as you do with $4.42 on super, and you get a lot more power via the added octane, for free.

It’s not an incredibly complex calculation to make, anyone who has completed sixth grade could work the math. So I have always hypothesized that the reason Americans do not embrace E85 as a performance fuel comes down to what you might call the Three Immutable Laws of Octane:

1. Heard of it.
2. It’s a good thing.
3. Spare me the details, I’m bored.

So, who cares about underdog fuels? Underdog people, that’s who.

Research from Propel Fuels over the years has offered up a more data driven rationale. American cities are populated with a lot of well-off people who are too preoccupied with other matters to think about the most cost effective way to fuel a car. Turns out, the people who think the most about value and fuel are found in the ranks of the disadvantaged.

Which brings us to Wapato.

You might not know this factoid, that 33 percent of the people in the United States get along on a household income of $50,000 or less — and that works out to about 110 million people. Not everyone, as it turns out, lives on the $250,000 media household income of tony Los Altos Hills in the San Fernando Valley, where electric cars are expected to be mandatory in 2035. 

Wapato checks in with a media income of $25,068, says here. It has all the ingredients for lower income in the United States: it’s rural, sits entirely within the Yakama Nation Reservation, and is 84 percent Latino.  

Why have rural communities become underdogs?

Let me sum up what happened to rural communities this way. As a benchmark, let’s start with 1920. Back then, a one pound box of corn flakes cost 12 cents and a 56 pound bushel of corn cost 54 cents. 

Today, the box of corn flakes costs $5.28 and the bushel of corn costs $4.34. The food has gone up by a factor of 44 and the feedstock has gone up by a factor of 8. 

Where did the rest of the money go? To the cities, my friend. The cities get the money for the food, because they control finance, marketing, technology and the value chain. That is where the money in agriculture goes, and that is what towns like Wapato and the Yakama Nation are attempting to do — bring more of the value chain, the value-add manufacturing, and so forth into the rural town. 

We ought to cheer them on. 

For one thing, towns like Wapato not only carry our history, they reveal our history in their streets, houses and byways. To illustrate:

1. Mark of the 1850s. An Old Mission where the whites first made contact with the tribes.
2. The 1880s.  A highway through town that was once a trail used by the tribes, later a mining trail.
3. The 1890s. An old town situated next to a water source and a food supply that was moved at the behest of a 19th century railroad to something more convenient to the flat, dry, useless ground that it suited to inexpensive rail construction.
4. The 1910s. A vibrant food production complex that supplies vital material to American diets and is mired in poverty by being left out of the supply and finance chain.
5. The 1920s. A housing design of the old type, garage in the back, accessible by an alley paved with gravel and that smells from creosote because the people in the area change and save their own engine oil.
6. The 1940s. A section of town cleared of Japanese in 1942 at the height of war hysteria.
7. The 1960s. A freeway nearby that killed off through traffic in the town when the Interstate Highway & Defense System was built.
8. The 1970s. A downtown section deserted for a regional mall situated somewhere down the line along the freeway.
9. The 1980s. A Dairy Queen and a Dollar General. Manhattan, population 1.646 million doesn’t have one of either.

They reveal what we were, and what we are becoming. And it’s not always a pretty picture. We talk a lot about a “return to nature” and a “return to natural”. But the shift to the cities just keeps going on and on, until rural towns become ghost towns. Perhaps one day the Dollar Trees and the Dairy Queens will be found in Manhattan, and the old rural towns will have revived. 

Why small towns are going to matter one heck of a lot more

We ought to care more.  The Union Gap, the passage through Rattlesnake Ridge cut by the Yakima River over the aeons, connects the Pacific outlet of the Lower Columbia River to the food baskets of the Yakima Valley and the Okanogan. That’s why the Union Gap has been an important trading post for more than 10,000 years. And in that fertile volcanic soil fed by the still-churning Cascades are grown 75 percent of the nation’s hops, 70 percent of the apples, 40 percent of the pears. Cider or beer, city folk, it’s grown in the Yakima Valley, and it’s a darn shame that the growers of our food have to live with inadequate medical, lousy internet, low incomes, and disappearing towns so that people can spend less money on their food and more on their vacations.

This is strategically important land, that’s why the railroads vied for it. For the government, an outlet to the Pacific decades before the Panama Canal. For farmers, an outlet to the Midwest for their agricultural and forest products — fruits and grain for the cities, corn for the hogs, lumber for builders, hops for the beermakers. So, settlers swept in from the East in search of cheap land for farming. They broke off from the Oregon Trail to find the Cariboo Trail, built by the tribes and possibly by the animals before that. In time, it became a stage route, then state road 3 in the days of Good Roads Associations, and ultimately US Highway 97. A couple of hundred yards south of where the settlers and the tribes fought the Battle of Union Gap in 1855, that’s where this filling station is.

97 connects us to the Columbia and south of that, to the heart of Oregon timber country. If you have a vision for the United States based on strategic use of renewable resources, this is the heart of the heart of it.

Times are changing

Times are changing. What we think of as mattering is changing. We have a new idea about the connection to strategic technology and strategic renewable resources.  Personally, I’d bet on the people of Wapato — a hundred years from now, we’ll need more of their intelligent attitude to energy and their resources, than we do now. Their time is coming. Maybe that’s what makes the arrival of E85 to the Yakima Valley so worth cheering for.

Today, the underdogs. But not forever.  As the old cartoon theme went, “Speed of lightning, roar of thunder, Fighting all who rob or plunder. Underdog. Underdog!”