Head Start for Arco

Atlantic Richfield Co.’s plan to start selling a cleaner-burning gasoline next month is encouraging news in itself. What it says about Southern California’s new commitment to clean up its air is perhaps even more encouraging.

The company has spent $20 million to develop and test a refining process that will produce gasoline that burns clean enough to reduce by about 20% pollution from older cars that are not equipped with catalytic converters to trap elements of smog. The company says that nearly one-third of its customers in Southern California drive older cars that still use leaded gasoline. The cleaner gasoline will replace leaded gasoline at 700 Arco stations on Sept. 1.

Arco announced its new fuel in the same neighborhood and on the same day that the state Air Resources Board was approving a 20-year plan for clean air developed by the South Coast Air Quality Management District and the Southern California Assn. of Governments. Part of the new Air Quality Management Plan calls for extensive use in the future of methanol to power cars, trucks and buses. Methanol burns far cleaner than gasoline or diesel oil.

One thing that the Arco announcement says about the clean-air plan is that the combination of regulations and new, as yet untested, technology on which the plan so crucially depends can indeed move the region toward its air-quality goals. There have been some complaints that important elements of the plan that would be put into effect 10 years down the road depend on technologies still to be developed.

In the case of Arco and cleaner gasoline, regulation provided part of a necessary nudge to do the research required to produce the new gasoline; competition provided the other. Arco made no bones about the fact that putting its new fuel on public view was timed to emphasize the company’s belief that even if methanol is widely used in Southern California, gasoline will be the dominant vehicle fuel as long as the world supply of petroleum lasts.

That will be the case if for no other reason than many of the 13 million cars on Southern California roads will still be there 20 years from now and still burning gasoline. Even if substantial numbers of methanol-burning cars are added to the region’s roads while the older cars are wearing out, it still will be necessary to make the gasoline-burners less polluting. Some of the cleaning up of tailpipes can result from pollution controls. Some must come from making the fuel itself cleaner.

As for the nudge from regulations, the petroleum industry knows that the Sacramento board is only a couple of years away from writing pollution standards for gasoline. That Arco was in one sense just getting a jump on the regulators takes absolutely nothing from the contribution to clean air that its new fuel will make. It just provides a timely and encouraging demonstration that the job of cleaning the air doesn’t mean that industry and regulators must always be yelling at each other.