Shift on MTBE May Clear Way for Energy Bill

Congressional negotiators said Sunday they had resolved a dispute over a controversial gasoline additive that had threatened passage of the first overhaul of national energy policy in more than a decade.

They said they did not expect the energy bill to include any legal protection for the manufacturers of methyl tertiary-butyl ether, or MTBE, which helps engines produce less smog but has been blamed for contaminating groundwater supplies across the country.

The decision not to shield MTBE manufacturers from environmental lawsuits should clear the way for negotiators to complete work on a final bill, perhaps as early as today, and send it to the House and the Senate for approval by the end of the week.

President Bush -- who has made the legislation a priority since taking office in January 2001, during the California energy crisis -- called top negotiators Sunday, prodding them to send him a bill before Congress begins its August recess.

Bush and lawmakers from both parties are eager to pass an energy bill to show their concern for high gasoline prices, even though the legislation would do little to provide immediate relief.

The president has called the energy legislation, aimed at helping to prevent fuel price increases and disruption of supply, critical to economic growth and national security. Like the last major energy bill, passed in 1992, the measure is aimed at reducing oil imports, which accounted for about 58% of U.S. consumption last year.

“I told the president that we should be able to get a bill to his desk late this week,” said Rep. Joe L. Barton (R-Texas), chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The bill includes a raft of measures designed to promote domestic production of oil, natural gas, coal and nuclear power; spur energy conservation; and strengthen the nation’s electricity grids.

A few contentious issues remain unsettled, such as whether to require 10% of the nation’s electricity to be generated from alternative sources, such as solar and wind power, by 2020; whether to permit a survey of offshore oil and gas resources; and how much corn-based ethanol should be added to the nation’s gasoline supply.

In addition, the bill’s total cost has yet to be determined.

The Senate bill would provide $14 billion in tax breaks to promote energy conservation and production, more than double the amount favored by the White House. While the House measure would provide $8 billion in tax breaks, they are skewed more toward the oil and gas industries, which Bush says do not need government help with oil prices so high.

But a critical breakthrough came Sunday when negotiators announced that they did not expect the MTBE legal protections to be included in the bill.

The House had pushed for the protections, contending that Congress was responsible for promoting use of the smog-fighting additive by requiring cleaner-burning gasoline in the nation’s most polluted regions. But the measure, which helped kill the 2003 energy bill, was opposed by a number of Republican and Democratic senators who said it would shift billions of dollars in cleanup costs to taxpayers.

In an effort to win support for the legal protections, House Republican leaders offered Friday to create a multibillion-dollar fund, financed by government and industry, to pay for cleaning contaminated sites, but that idea was rejected by a number of senators.

Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-N.M.), chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said Sunday that the legal protections were gone from the bill.