47 Senators Oppose EPA’s Plan to Boost Ethanol Use : Gasoline: Agency’s proposal seen increasing cost to consumers and causing marketplace chaos.

Almost half the U.S. Senate sent a letter to Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner Wednesday urging her to drop a proposal to guarantee the use of ethanol in a big chunk of the market for anti-smog gasoline.

The EPA made the proposal in December, even though its own scientists found that corn-based ethanol could actually bring more smog when it’s added to gasoline in warm weather.

Oxygenates such as ethanol and methyl tertiary butyl ether, better known as MTBE, add oxygen to gasoline. This improves combustion and cuts emissions of carbon monoxide, a poisonous gas.

Although both additives are already added to the gasoline sold in many cities in the winter, when carbon monoxide is a big problem, EPA scientists wanted to ban ethanol use in the summer because of its smog-forming tendencies.

Corn farmers cried foul. Banning ethanol in the summer would severely hamper its use in the year-round market for anti-smog gasoline, which starts in some areas in 1995.

Reacting to these complaints, White House and EPA officials came up with a plan that would force refiners making anti-smog gasoline to use ethanol or one of its derivatives--ethyl tertiary butyl ether or ETBE--for 30% of their oxygenate needs.

Under this plan, refiners could use ethanol or ETBE to fulfill the 30% requirement in the winter. In the summer, when smog is a significant worry, ETBE would be the only option for fulfilling the 30% mandate.

Now 47 Senators are saying this is a bad idea.

“We urge you to reject this market mandate and withdraw this proposal,” they said in their letter to Browner.

Sen. Bill Bradley (D-N.J.), a longtime opponent of subsidies to ethanol makers, rounded up the signatures and signed the letter himself. Others who signed include J. Bennett Johnston (D-La.), the chairman of the Senate Energy Committee, and the ranking Republican on that panel, Malcolm Wallop of Wyoming.

The senators say the ethanol plan will increase costs to consumers and cause chaos in the marketplace as refiners struggle to prove compliance with the 30% mandate.

The proposal could also make air pollution worse, they say, and it will certainly cut the revenue flowing into a federal trust fund for highway improvement.