ARCO Seeks Pollution Trade-Off : Environment: Oil company says emissions from expanded refinery would be offset by credits from its ‘clean’ gasolines. The request has outraged activists.
ARCO Products Co. launched its line of “clean” gasolines with a public relations blitz and a giant scoreboard on the side of a downtown skyscraper that clicked off the pounds of pollutants eliminated from the region’s smoggy skies through use of the firm’s emission-control products.
Now, the company is quietly negotiating with the South Coast Air Quality Management District for a trade-off: the ability to expand operations at its Carson refinery. The expansion would generate more pollution and erode the touted benefits of the new gasoline.
Tom Eichhorn, an AQMD spokesman, said ARCO “makes a good argument” that it should be granted credit for reducing pollution by selling cleaner-burning fuel. Approval, he added, would be “precedent-setting.”
Environmentalists are outraged by the prospect. They charge that ARCO’s “drive away smog” campaign was misleading and worry that the precedent set by allowing pollution credits for producing clean gas would be a dangerous one.
They note that reformulated gasoline will be required by 1995 under the new federal Clean Air Act and that ARCO is only doing sooner what it will have to do later.
“It’s absurd that the district would even consider such a proposal,” said Tom Soto, president of the Coalition for Clean Air.
The company is seeking the credits under a district regulation governing construction of facilities or expansion of operations. To get permission for such changes, companies must guarantee that the new pollution would be offset by a corresponding reduction in pollution elsewhere in the region.
Traditionally, the reductions have come from firms that shut down or switch to cleaner manufacturing processes. The businesses that have cut pollution can use their credits themselves or sell the offset rights.
Credits for low-polluting products are authorized under the regulation, but ARCO is the first to file an application, said Edward Camarena, who heads the AQMD’s Office of Operations.
ARCO officials said that if they receive credits for emission reductions, they would use some of them to add processing units for the production of more clean gasoline. “The overall benefit to the (region) would far exceed the amount we put into the air,” said Pat Avery, the refinery’s manager of environmental health and safety.
Such reasoning makes environmental activists angry. “They ought to be making clean gasoline and cleaning up their refinery, too,” said Mary Nichols, senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That’s like saying that if I’m on a diet and I drink a Diet Coke instead of a regular Coke, then I’ve justified eating a piece of chocolate cake. But the problem is, I shouldn’t be having either one--the regular soda or the cake.”
Arco introduced its lower-emission gasolines with a huge advertising campaign that included not only several of the giant lighted pollution scoreboards but commercials featuring the voice of actor James Earl Jones that saturated radio and television. The firm spent $10 million in just five weeks after it began marketing its reformulated unleaded gasoline.
The campaign made Emission Control-1 gasoline one of the most heavily touted products introduced in Southern California.
ARCO wants credit for 534 tons per year of hydrocarbons, a major component of smog, and more than 11,000 tons per year of carbon monoxide, based on sales of its EC-Premium gasoline, introduced in September, 1990. It is not requesting credits based on its first emission-control product, EC-1, which is marketed for older cars that use regular leaded gasoline.
The Carson refinery emits about 2,000 tons of hydrocarbons per year and 200 tons of carbon monoxide per year.
If ARCO persuades the AQMD to grant it credits for clean fuel purchased by motorists, 20% would go into the district’s Community Bank for small businesses that generally cannot afford to buy the credits. The oil company could sell the remaining rights it does not use in its expansion plans.
“But it would all still be pollution that could go into the air,” said Tim Little, the Coalition for Clean Air’s executive director.
ARCO filed its application for credits last November. The latest negotiating session was in April and more rounds are expected, said the AQMD’s Camarena.
A major sticking point has been the issue of how long pollution credits for clean gasoline should be effective.
Camarena said that any credits granted would have to expire in 1995, when all gasoline sold in Los Angeles, Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties will have to be lower in pollutants.
From ARCO’s point of view, credits should last as long as the company’s refinery. “It would encourage innovation,” Avery said.
“This gasoline is what allowed (the U. S. Congress) to mandate cleaner fuels,” added Tom Markin, the refinery’s manager of environmental protection. “We’re the ones who showed them it could be done.”
