Fight Over Anti-Smog Additive Escalates

Top state health officials and the oil industry went on a counteroffensive Wednesday after the state Senate Transportation Committee stunned them by approving legislation that could force oil companies to remove a key ingredient from new, cleaner-burning gasoline.

Underscoring the high stakes, state officials led by California Environmental Protection Agency chief James Strock on Wednesday came to the defense of the reformulated gasoline and the key additive, MTBE.

“The air benefits of the new gasoline are unquestionable, immediate and of lasting importance,” Strock said, insisting that any dangers posed by the ingredients of the new gasoline are outweighed by the smog reductions.

The scramble comes after Sen. Richard Mountjoy (R-Arcadia) won passage late Tuesday in the Transportation Committee of a bill that could eliminate MTBE from gasoline.

The committee approved the measure (SB 521) on a 7-1 vote after Mountjoy agreed to stop short of calling for an outright ban, as he initially proposed.

Instead, Mountjoy accepted an amendment imposing a one-year moratorium on the use of MTBE starting Jan. 1 unless Cal/EPA, the Department of Water Resources and Department of Health Services agree that MTBE is safe.

The bill must still be considered by several more Senate and Assembly committees and be voted on in both houses before it can reach Gov. Pete Wilson’s desk.

Joan Denton, an air pollution specialist at the state Air Resources Board, said the requirement that would be imposed by Mountjoy’s bill--proving that MTBE can cause no health hazards--is one that cannot be met.

“It’s impossible to prove a negative,” Denton said. “That type of study has never been done in science.”

Complaining about the “gross amount of misinformation” about the reformulated gasoline in use statewide, Jeff Wilson, spokesman for the Western States Petroleum Assn., said MTBE is the most widely studied chemical in gasoline and is far less toxic than what it replaced, benzene, a known human carcinogen.

Gasoline “is the product that we manufacture,” Wilson said. “When you potentially start to mandate the use or the makeup of that product, it becomes a priority issue.”

Oil companies began adding MTBE to gasoline in greater concentrations last year to comply with state and federal clean air requirements. By using MTBE, oil refiners were able to remove most benzene from gasoline.

MTBE can cause cancer in laboratory animals, although it is thought to be far less toxic than benzene.

Although experts say reformulated gasoline has improved air quality and dramatically lowered concentrations of benzene in the air, MTBE has been spreading into water wells, primarily from leaking underground gasoline tanks. The problem is most acute in such places as Santa Monica, making water in some locales undrinkable.

MTBE in levels as low as 35 parts per billion in water can be tasted, making the water unpalatable.

Denton said the state relied on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s conclusion that MTBE was an acceptable and safe additive for gasoline.

But she added that in all the state’s discussions about the impact reformulated gasoline would have on air, no one thought to ask about the impact of the new gasoline’s components on water.

“The short answer is it was never an issue,” Denton said. “Nobody raised it. Hindsight is 20-20.”

The largest single manufacturer of MTBE is Arco Chemical, a sister firm of the oil company Arco. One alternative to MTBE might be ethanol, which is made from corn and manufactured by the farm giant Archer Daniels Midland.

Chevron, Arco and other oil companies only recently completed a $3-billion retooling of their California refineries to manufacture reformulated gasoline with MTBE. If Mountjoy’s bill were to become law, the refinery operators would have to retool once more.

“Poor babies,” Mountjoy said Wednesday in an interview. “If they’re going to poison the world [with MTBE], they ought to get it out.”

Mountjoy, who is considering whether to run for lieutenant governor, has become a frequent guest on radio talk shows since he has emerged as a critic of the state’s renewed efforts to reduce smog.

Conservative talk show hosts, particularly in Northern California, have been attacking reformulated gasoline, and the new Smog Check II program aimed at badly polluting cars.

“I supported oil companies for a long time,” said Mountjoy, among the more conservative legislators in Sacramento. “But they’re just flat wrong on this. This stuff is toxic.”

To win initial passage of his measure, Mountjoy struck an unlikely alliance with one of the Legislature’s most liberal members, Sen. Tom Hayden (D-Los Angeles), a Transportation Committee member who helped push for the bill’s passage Tuesday night.

“It’s clear that a mistake of enormous proportions has been made,” Hayden said in an interview Wednesday, pointing out that MTBE leaking from an underground gasoline tank on Wilshire Boulevard has fouled several of Santa Monica’s wells. “At best, it is the law of unintended consequences.”

Hayden pointed out that oil industry leaders offered to develop a less polluting gasoline in the early 1990s as part of their effort to persuade state officials to ease up on mandates that car makers accelerate the development of electric cars--something Hayden supports.

“They’re panicked. Billions are at stake here,” Hayden said of the oil industry and others, including environmentalists, who have supported the use of MTBE as a way of cleaning the air.

Transportation Committee Chairman Sen. Quentin Kopp (I-San Francisco) also voted for the measure after drafting the amendments. Kopp said that the oil industry, working with Wilson administration regulators, decided to add MTBE to gasoline and that the Legislature never was asked to be involved in the effort.

Nonetheless, Kopp has been singled out by talk show hosts in the Bay Area who have been crusading against the state’s renewed efforts to reduce smog and have been trying to kindle a recall of him.

On Wednesday, Kopp suggested that the oil refinery operators should start making plans to retool their refineries to take MTBE out.

“They better start now, unless they want to roll the dice that the health agencies won’t find health problems with MTBE,” Kopp said.