The Clean Air Act (CAA) Amendments of 1990 bear first official fruit at U.S. gasoline pumps next week, and air pollution is plummeting across the land. This is not to imply a causal relationship but rather to note an interesting coincidence: publication of the Environmental Protection Agency's annual urban air quality trends report 2 weeks before oxygenated gasoline sales mandates take effect in cities with carbon monoxide pollution problems.
The EPA report makes clear something that staved largely hidden during debates over amendments to the CAA; namely, that the U.S. has come a long way in its eight against air pollution. The scores for 1982-91: Ambient smog levels-down 8%; lead ambient levels in the atmosphere-down 89%; sulfur dioxide ambient levels-down 20%; ambient CO-down 30%; ambient particulate levels-down 10% since 1987, when the standard changed; nitrogen dioxide ambient levels-down 6%. Of 97 areas identified in 1990 as not meeting ground level ozone standards, 41 now comply. And 13 of the 42 so-called nonattainment areas for CO now meet the standard. EPA officials say that of the remaining nonattainment areas, all but Los Angeles and Houston show steady progress by most measures and that even Los Angeles, the area with by far the most ozone infractions, is improving in places.
A GENERAL CRISIS?
Who would have thought it in the couple of years before President Bush signed the CAA reauthorization law on Nov. 15, 1990? During that period, the media ran picture after picture of smoggy skylines-usually Los Angeles-and lumped air pollution with alleged global warming, exaggerated pesticide and asbestos scares, and the Exxon Valdez oil spill to mourn the arrival of a general environmental crisis. So Congress enacted stricter vehicle emissions standards and a perplexing recipe for gasoline.
Required investments, which could total $10-30 billion, have forced some refineries to close and placed countless others in economic jeopardy. Beginning Nov. 1, refiners must sell gasoline with at least 2.7 wt % oxygen during winter months in CO problem areas. The next hurdle comes Jan. 1, 1995, when they must begin selling reformulated gasoline and meeting new emission standards in ozone nonattainment areas.
WHERE THE CRISIS EXISTS
This costly revolution in gasoline chemistry and economics responds to an air pollution crisis that exists nowhere in the U.S. outside of Los Angeles and the collective imagination of an oversold citizenry. As EPA's latest report shows, pollution is falling in all statutory categories and was doing so when Congress reauthorized CAA. Problem areas are disappearing, and those that remain, except Los Angeles, meet CO or ozone standards nearly all the time.
When Congress reauthorized CAA the problem was not a pollution crisis but the failure of many major cities to meet the original act's strict standards on time. Everywhere but Los Angeles, all that was needed was more time for the original CAA to work-especially for new vehicles to replace old polluters-and possibly some adjustments for anticipated increases in driving. But Congress, cheered on by the Bush administration, behaved as though the original CAA hadn't worked at all.
So the U.S. has fewer refineries than before and is entering an era of more-costly gasoline. And the revolution might spread. Cities on the margin of ozone attainment can mandate sales of reformulated gasoline even if the federal government does not. Many probably will exercise the option, proving that the U.S., indeed, has an air quality crisis. It has air quality everyone wants to ignore.
Copyright 1992 Oil & Gas Journal. All Rights Reserved.
