Unocal Seeks 500 Cars for Clean-Air Tests : Environment: The company will work with the state to study 1971-79 autos. Clean-air credits are at stake.
Unocal Corp. and the state of California will buy 500 old cars and test them to determine how much they contribute to Southern California’s air pollution.
State air-quality officials hope that the results of the extensive testing--involving 1971-79 cars--will spawn similar buy-back programs throughout the state to take older, often high-polluting cars off the road.
Despite tightening emissions standards, cars and trucks account for as much as half the state’s urban smog.
“Car-crushing programs by themselves will not cure the smog problem,” said Jananne Sharpless, chairwoman of the California Air Resources Board, which will conduct much of the testing on the cars. “But they will help put a major dent in it by speeding up the retirement of high-polluting cars.”
Public agencies and private companies across the state are considering similar programs, Sharpless said.
Under state Air Resources Board policy, companies receive credit that can be used to offset pollution liabilities at their industrial facilities or refineries. The test results from the buy-back program will help determine the size of air-pollution credits companies can receive for buying and scrapping older cars. The more pollution the discarded cars produce, the more credits companies can receive.
The tests will also be the first analysis of how effective the early generation of catalytic converters have been at reducing pollution.
Sharpless noted that people who sell their cars to Unocal will probably go out and buy other cars, which will contribute again to pollution. But she praised the program as “complementary” to other ARB air-pollution control policies.
“The idea of using old-car buybacks has helped improve air quality and is gaining momentum,” said Richard J. Stegemeier, Unocal’s chairman and chief executive. “SCRAP 2 will help us learn just how dirty these old cars actually are.”
In 1990, Unocal sponsored its first South Coast Recycled Auto Project, or SCRAP, buying and junking more than 8,000 pre-1971 cars. The company says it spent $6 million to purchase the old cars and took 13 million pounds of air pollutants out of the South Coast Air Basin.
Unocal would have to spend up to 10 times as much to achieve the same reduction in air pollution at its Los Angeles refinery--and that process would take three to five years, Stegemeier said.
Oil companies favor such programs as more cost effective than some standards being placed on manufacturers and refiners that call for millions of dollars in new equipment. But Unocal believes that current estimates of how much pollution old cars emit are low. It hopes that the tests will find higher emissions levels, and therefore give it and other companies more credit for their scrap-car programs.
Under SCRAP 2, Unocal will buy 250 cars from model years 1971-1974 and 250 cars from 1975-1979, when the first catalytic converters were required in California.
All will be tested, with 60 being given more extensive tests at ARB’s laboratory. Unocal will test the catalytic converters at its Brea testing facility.
Unocal has set up an information phone line for people who want to sell the company their car (in English: 213-977-7761; in Spanish: 213-977-7722). Passenger cars or pickup trucks must have been continuously registered in the South Coast Air Quality Management District for two years, must be privately owned and must be able to be driven to the Unocal collection site in downtown Los Angeles.
