U.S. refiners and their gasoline customers shouldn't have to worry about fantasies; they have enough problems in the real world. But a yarn now circulating in Congress and some news media warrants their attention.
It goes like this: Refiners didn't remove lead from gasoline until the Environmental Protection Agency forced them to. Then, to raise octane, they blended more aromatics into gasoline, which aggravated ozone pollution. Therefore, if the U. S. is to solve its air quality problems, Congress must write the formula for cleaner-burning gasoline because refiners can't be trusted to perform the task on their own.
THE FANTASY'S EFFECTS
This new fantasy is helping to propel the Clean Air Act (CAA) reauthorization bill's faulty fuel mandate through Congress. And it will reappear the next time Congress attends to air quality and vehicle fuel, which could be soon. The proposed gasoline recipe will raise costs and probably create as many air quality problems as it solves.
The fantasy implies that environmental considerations alone should dictate refinery operating decisions. To have come out righteous in the fantasy's analysis, for example, refiners should have chosen a different strategy in raising gasoline octane as regulations phased out lead. They should have shown more concern for ozone pollution and shouldn't have waited until now to experiment with "clean" fuels.
Alas, refiners in the real world have to provide adequate supplies of product at competitive prices and meet whatever environmental strictures apply at the time. Until recently, the principal environmental goal regarding gasoline was to remove lead, not ozone precursors. Refiners met the octane challenges of the 1970s and 1980s as efficiently as they could, commonly by increasing reforming capacities and severities to boost yields of high-octane aromatics.
Ozone smog, while a stubborn problem in a few areas, took center political stage only after the unusually hot summer of 1988, which reversed a long nationwide decline in this form of pollution. Yet the retrospective morality of the 1990 fantasy insists that the Righteous Refiner in past octane crunches would have rejected aromatics in favor of some more-expensive option that contributed less to ozone smog. The fantasy fails to note that the Righteous Refiner, forced to charge more at the pump than his competitors, would have gone out of business for lack of sales.
Individual refiners in business to stay don't impose costly environmental standards on themselves. Yet most refiners support, even welcome, reasonable environmental performance standards for their products, as long as the government applies them equitably. Setting and enforcing those standards are proper roles of government. Congress, however, seems determined to bypass that crucial step for the sake of its fuel-chemistry preferences.
IMPRESSIVE PROGRESS
As the special report beginning on p. 33 shows, refiners take product environmental performance seriously. Once the Bush administration made clear the inevitability of new fuel standards for all market participants, refiners introduced promising gasoline, reformulations they'd have had trouble selling before. They began working with automakers to find vehicle-fuel combinations that reduce specific types of emissions most efficiently. In a short time, they have made impressive progress.
All it took was official notice that improvements would be required of everyone in the market. That's how government and industry should interact. For their quick progress in a critical issue, refiners deserve praise, not distrust. For letting a silly fantasy limit technical options and raise costs, Congress deserves a consumer revolt.
Copyright 1990 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
