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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: gao seng who wrote (230359)	2/23/2002 8:37:40 PM
From: gao seng	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Who is Davis gonna blame this time? Enron is bankrupt. I guess it will be Exxon Mobile's fault. May as well go ahead and short them all the way to zero, I guess. -- Consultant: California Governor's Ban on MTBE Additive Will Double Gas Prices Jump to first matched term By Chris Bowman, The Sacramento Bee, Calif. Feb. 20--The price of California's gasoline will double at the pump if Gov. Gray Davis keeps his order to eliminate the environmentally troublesome MTBE additive by the end of this year, a consultant reported Tuesday. In an economic analysis commissioned by the Davis administration, the oil refinery consulting firm Stillwater Associates said the governor should postpone the MTBE ban to November 2005. The energy advisers said the replacement of MTBE with Midwestern-produced ethanol will result in a statewide gasoline shortage of 5 percent to 10 percent, with Southern California motorists feeling the brunt of the shortfall. If Davis sticks to his MTBE phaseout deadline of Dec. 31, refineries would not be able to fully meet the state's gasoline demands because the ships, railroad tankers, rail lines and port storage tanks needed to transport and distribute the ethanol and other fuel components would be inadequate. The supply crunch would be reflected by a 50 percent to 100 percent price increase at pumps across the state, the consultant concluded. "Prices will move in the range of $2 to $3 per gallon when crude- oil pricing and refinery operations would normally have resulted in pricing around $1.50 per gallon," the report said. The analysis, presented at a state Energy Commission workshop Tuesday, does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Davis administration but rather reflects an industry projection on how an MTBE phaseout would affect the supply and demand of gasoline, said William Rukeyser, spokesman for the state Environmental Protection Agency. "It provides a significant piece of the puzzle but not the whole thing," he said. In the mid-1990s, California refineries more than tripled the volume of MTBE to 11 percent as the most economical way to meet federally mandated specifications for low-polluting gasoline sold in urban California and other smoggy areas of the country. In 1999, Davis ordered that MTBE be phased out of California's gasoline because of its potential to pollute drinking water supplies. Many studies have shown that MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, travels farther and lasts longer in groundwater than other chemicals in gasoline spills and leaks from storage tanks. Ethanol is the only practical substitute that would meet the federal requirement for blending oxygen-boosting chemicals into the clean-burning fuel Congress prescribed for smoggy areas. newsalert.com