Bureaucratic Gas yet We Wonder Why Gas is So High?

How many jobs has the EPA cost this Country with their quirky rules?  A state will meet their standards and then they tighten them some more.  If I could choose one agency to lose their clout and be merged into the Interior, it would be the EPA and some of their junk science.


This article is right on the money.  If I am traveling to Dallas, I always get gas on the way down in Gainesville, TX, in the reformulated gas months as they are outside the reformulated area of Dallas/Fort Worth.  Usually get gas there coming back or in Ardmore, OK, so I don't have to pay an additional ten cents.  Used to buy lottery tickets all the time and then Oklahoma finally got the lottery.  There is only one small problem with scratch offs in Oklahoma, they have better odds of winning in Texas.  Get gas, buy a lottery ticket when you cross the Texas border works for very well.  More than once I have paid for dinner with the winnings.  

When it comes to air pollution, there’s always been the country as a whole and then California, which because of its unique geography and climate has always had the nation’s worst air pollution levels by a considerable margin. Congress has always given California special leeway in crafting air pollution regulations that go beyond what the EPA requires of the other 49 states.

The author was talking about the Clean Air Act of 1990 in relation to California but we ran into their strict smog restrictions when we were transferred to Norton AFB, San Bernardino, in 1981.  A friend of ours who worked with my husband but also loved to tinker with cars outside of the Air Force kept tweaking our car until it finally passed the out of state inspection for cars not manufactured for California.  Our truck passed with flying colors as he only tweaked it once.  They were both almost new vehicles but looked like GM had made it easier with the truck to pass the out-of-state inspection in California.  Every year we were there we had to get a waiver as our Buick wagon would never meet their requirements so we would go back to our friend, he would tweak it, we would pass, and then go back to him to put it back to normal so we had good gas mileage.  I cannot even fathom how bad it is today in California.  They were nuts then.

When Los Angeles were host to the Olympics in 1984, they ruled that trucks had to stay off the interstates from 6 in the morning until later in the evening.  Then they asked people to carpool or go in at different times.  Not only did we not have traffic jams in the LA basin but smog was almost non-existent.  Wouldn't you have thought they would have figured out that one of the primary causes might be trucks?  As soon as the Olympics departed LA everything returned to normal including the smog, trucks on the freeways at all hours, and huge traffic jams.  We could look down at the smog from where we lived in Upper Yucaipa.  When it was clear you could see the Anaheim Hills.  

Then they have the lanes for two or more people which is a joke -- it goes for several miles and then they all merge back over causing more traffic jams.  It took my youngest daughter and I over 2 1/2 hours to leave University City and get to the San Bernardino County line where traffic started flowing better, and we were able to go to In and Out Burger without risking an accident by getting off and back on the freeway.   Should have gone around through Pasadena and then come down but never thought it would be that bad.  Lesson learned!  It was our first trip back in years.  If a place needed tons of light rail, it is the LA area.

Cannot believe the amount of different kinds of gasoline that are being produced.  I wondered when we went to Phoenix for the Bowl Game stopping in Denver with family first and saw 86 octane at the pump when we always have 87.  It never dawned on me each state sets their own standards for gasoline that will meet the EPA standards.  We don't have reformulated gas in Oklahoma thanks to the clear thinking of our two Senators who took the EPA to court and won.

Bureaucratic Gas
To lower prices at the pump, abolish the boutique fuel regime.
Apr 2, 2012, Vol. 17, No. 28 • By STEVEN F. HAYWARD 

Quick: How many kinds of gasoline do we use in America? Most people would say three or six: regular unleaded, mid-grade, and premium, along with the ethanol blends of the same that have become nearly universal. The actual number is somewhere above 45, though hard to pin down exactly, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO). It might even be closer to 70. Thirty-four states use specially blended gasoline, usually during the summer, which is one reason gasoline prices always rise during the “driving season.”

Thomas Fluharty

If you want a good idea of why this makes no sense, meet me in St. Louis. St. Louis, Missouri, uses one kind of gasoline; East St. Louis, Illinois, right across the Mississippi River, uses a different blend. Meanwhile, the surrounding suburbs use a third kind. Same metropolitan area, different gasolines, and they can’t be sold across jurisdictional lines, so refiners and distributors must maintain three separate systems for the three parts of the St. Louis metro area.

Is this a conspiracy of the evil oil companies to fatten their margins? Mostly no: It’s the product of EPA bureaucrats and the Clean Air Act, stubbornly maintained even though boutique fuels now deliver only marginal reductions in air pollution from cars, if any at all. And it’s a regulation President Obama could clear away if he wanted to. It wouldn’t deliver a large reduction in gasoline pump prices, but even 10 to 15 cents a gallon—a plausible figure for California’s market—would help.

When Congress took up the Clean Air Act of 1990, it decided to take reformulated gasoline national. This is where the mischief starts. The infant ethanol industry saw an opening to juice up the market for its uncompetitive product if oxygenates were mandated for the entire national gasoline market, even though there is strong evidence that ethanol, though an oxygenate, actually increases ozone. No matter: The mania to promote “alternative fuels” was shoehorned into the Clean Air Act as an adjunct, and while environmentalists generally like mandates, one other party really liked this particular one: the refining industry. 

The bizarre world of boutique gasoline owes its origin to the usual suspects: California (of course) and the congressional sausage-rolling involved in the writing of the Clean Air Act of 1990. When it comes to air pollution, there’s always been the country as a whole and then California, which because of its unique geography and climate has always had the nation’s worst air pollution levels by a considerable margin. Congress has always given California special leeway in crafting air pollution regulations that go beyond what the EPA requires of the other 49 states. But this frequently wreaks havoc with national industries, especially autos, since any auto mandate passed in California essentially is imposed on the entire country. Carmakers don’t want to make one kind of car for California and another for everywhere else. But oil refiners are a different matter: They could readily make a different kind of gasoline for California—one that would help the auto industry solve some of its compliance problems. 

As California was ramping up its plans to fight smog in the late 1980s, there was talk of imposing very stringent tailpipe emissions standards on California cars, and perhaps even higher fuel economy standards to suppress fuel use. That’s when the oil refining industry stepped in with the idea to produce reformulated gasoline (RFG) for the California market that would deliver near-term environmental benefits by reducing emissions of unburned hydrocarbons from the auto fleet.  

A few basics about ozone explain why this made some sense in 1990. Ground-level ozone is the trickiest air pollution problem. Unlike other forms of air pollution, like sulfur dioxide, where there is basically a straightforward relation between what comes out of a smokestack and what’s in the air you breathe, ozone is not directly emitted from cars or factories. It’s a combination of several chemicals that have to “cook” in sunlight. The amount produced depends on temperature, humidity, and geography. Different parts of the country can thus have wildly different ozone levels even with identical emissions, and the same metropolitan area can have wildly different ozone levels from day to day. Ozone tends to be much worse in hot summer weather than in winter, though there are exceptions, such as mile-high Denver and Minnesota. (Some areas of California actually experience higher ozone levels on weekends, when there is much less driving and industrial activity. This counterintuitive “weekend effect” is driving air quality specialists slightly crazy right now.) 

A major component chemical for ozone is unburned hydrocarbons—essentially, gasoline that evaporates from car engines, gas pumps, and so forth. That’s one reason we started sealing car gas tanks with intake flaps, and redesigned gas pumps with those annoying sleeves to prevent evaporation of gasoline (called “fugitive emissions” in the trade). Reformulated gasolines aim to lower vapor pressure so there’s less evaporation, and use “oxygenates” to increase combustion in the engine so fewer unburned hydrocarbons go out the tailpipe. Back around 1990 it was calculated that reformulated gasoline could reduce hydrocarbon emissions from autos by as much as 20 percent.

There was nowhere near enough ethanol to satisfy the new oxygenate requirement, so most areas decided to use methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE). It ended up being one of the great environmental disasters of modern times, and a textbook example of the law of unintended consequences. MTBE is a potent water pollutant, and leakage of MTBE from underground tanks began showing up on a large scale. The resulting uproar—and wave of lawsuits against oil companies—meant a swift end to MTBE, leaving mostly ethanol as the replacement, and sure enough, ethanol use in gasoline has grown almost twenty-fold since 1990.

Excerpt:  Read More at:  The Weekly Standard