Orrie Swayze is passionate about increasing the use of higher ethanol blends. He doesn’t mince words when he says all the false excuses that have been used to try to keep consumers from using blends like E30 are just excuses to continue poisoning children. The most vulnerable members of the population, he stresses, are children and unborn children, who are at risk of the greatest harm when exposed to toxic emissions from idling vehicles and moving traffic.  

Marketing an E30 blend with 30 percent ethanol content means benzene and benzene-related aromatic octane enhancers can be removed from the fuel, Swayze told me. Benzene is a known carcinogen. “When they took out lead (in gas, they) introduced aromatic octane enhancers and they just introduced an entirely new way to poison our children,” he said.

Swayze farms nearly 800 acres in northeast South Dakota. “I’m a retired farmer so I’ve backed off,” he says with a laugh. He was also on the founding board of the South Dakota Corn Growers and the American Coalition for Ethanol, both of which were formed more than 25 years ago.

As a higher blend advocate, naturally Swayze is also a blender pump promoter. In fact, he was intimately involved in the effort to install alternative fuel pumps that were among the very first in the nation, back in late 2004-2005. I first heard about his work in this area at the 26th annual Unite and Ignite ethanol conference put on by American Coalition for Ethanol, held in late August in Des Moines, Iowa.

Ron Lamberty, senior vice president of ACE, told how Swayze asked him about the possibility of gas pumps that could mix ethanol on site. Lamberty mentioned existing equipment, a diesel dial-a-blend pump. Later, Swayze told him he had an idea for what is essentially today’s blender pumps. “Which was nuts, it wasn’t going to work,” Lamberty said ironically, to laughter from the audience.

Swayze doesn’t take full credit for the idea, saying there were others with the same thing on their minds. “It was kind of a consensus thought,” he said. “Everybody said, ‘Gee, I wish we could do that here.’” (dial-a-blend diesel pumps)

It was common practice at the time for some consumers to splash blend to get the ethanol blend they wanted. That meant pulling up to a gas pump and putting in some unleaded fuel and some E85. This was inconvenient and cumbersome. “Why burden people to do that just to use higher blends,” he asked.

In his quest to make blender pumps a reality, Swayze contacted Al Kasperson, a former instructor at the Lake Area Technical School in Watertown, S.D. Kasperson was the one that mentioned another type of diesel pump, a push button pump for which consumers could select diesel that was summer blend, winter blend or something in between. “Al says, “Why can’t we use that with E85 and unleaded?’”

Swayze then contacted Steve Kleespie of Morris, Minn.-based Westmor Industries. “He was ready to jump on that,” he said. The end result was that Sioux Valley Co-op of South Dakota decided to put in some blender pumps, rather than all new E85 pumps, as they had previously planned. The company installed the pumps in the mid-2000s just after the very first blender pumps were installed in Britton, S.D. “I was excited about it because it was really going to be a grand, national demonstration,” Swayze said.

“What the blender pump does is break the blend wall,” he added, “if people realize we can have toxic-free gasoline by removing the most toxic components and the least combustible components in gasoline. To even think about that before was unheard of, because you’ve got to change the whole auto fleet.”