Energy bill could clean up state's gasoline more quickly

By Garrett Young on Monday, August 15, 2005.

listen:

Thanks to the new federal energy bill, gas stations in New Hampshire will no longer be required to sell gasoline with MTBE.

MTBE is added to gas to help reduce air pollution.

But it has contaminated public water supplies and thousands of private wells.

NHPRâ€™s Garrett Young reports that eliminating MTBE, however, should not result in an increase in smoggy days.

In order to meet federal clean air standards, New Hampshire has required its four southern counties to distribute a clean-burning fuel known as reformulated gasoline.

Adding MTBE to gasoline successfully reduces harmful gasoline emissions, particularly carbon monoxide.

And itâ€™s been the most cost-effective way to make reformulated gas in the northeast.

But the additive is a suspected carcinogen that has polluted water supplies across the state.

New Hampshire lawmakers have banned the sale of MTBE as of January 2007, but it may be gone from the state sooner.

The federal energy bill that President Bush signed last week allows gasoline producers to phase out MTBE across the East Coast beginning in May.

But what about the emissions that MTBE was reducing?

Department of Environmental Services officials say the change will have a minimal effect on air quality.

Michael Fitzgerald works in the DES air resources division.

â€œReformulated gas still has to achieve the same mandated reductions on emissions of all organic compounds â€¦ As long as we maintain reformulated gasoline here in the southern part of the state, we expect the air quality, as far as emissions from cars, to be the same.â€ (:17)

By 2007, when the stateâ€™s ban on MTBE is to take effect, distributors had planned to move toward another additive, ethanol.

But oil industry representatives say that reformulated gas without MTBE or ethanol can burn just as clean.

They say they can still meet state and federal clean air standards.

Ed Murphy is with the American Petroleum Institute.

â€œThe gasoline will be equal, if not better performing, from an environmental perspective â€¦ This legislation should, at worst, leave air quality unaffected.â€ (:09)

But, DES officials say, motor vehicles still constitute the stateâ€™s largest and fastest growing source of air pollution. Removing MTBE does not solve the larger problem.

New Hampshire Conservation Law Foundation Vice President Nancy Girard says that the best way to improve air quality is to reduce the number of cars on the road.

"It's really a lot of planning that could allow people to reduce the number of vehicle miles that they're traveling. And consequently what that would do, would be a net benefit to all of us in air quality."

Even as MTBE is phased out of the stateâ€™s gasoline, cleanup of the water pollution it has caused is an ongoing problem.

New Hampshire and a number of towns and counties around the country have sued oil manufacturers to help pay for the effort.

For NHPR News, Iâ€™m GY