"60 Minutes" Faulted for Ignoring Ethanol

January 19, 2000

Renewable Fuels Association President Eric Vaughn applauds the CBS news show "60 Minutes" for investigating the potential health threat posed by the use of MTBE in reformulated gasoline but criticizes the program for dismissing the potential for ethanol to replace MTBE.

CBS correspondent Steve Kroft reported on MTBE on the Jan 16 program, noting that MTBE is threatening to become a national crisis; 49 states have detected MTBE in ground water at some levels. The news program, says Vaughn, blamed the Clean Air Act for the problem.

"The problem is not the Clean Air Act," Vaughn says. "The problem is that oil companies chose the wrong oxygenate. Oxygenates like ethanol have helped refiners exceed the Clean Air Act's performance standards. We should not allow the unintended consequences of one oxygenate (MTBE) to undermine the clean air benefits which have been achieved."

Vaughn's comments were in a letter to CBS. He pointed out there is nothing in the clean Air Act that requires refiners to blend MTBE in reformulated gasoline depsite comments made by a Sunoco executive that refiners were forced to use MTBE by law, Vaughn said. He noted that Getty Petroleum recently switched from MTBE to ethanol on the east coast. The Chicago-Milwaukee reformulated gasoline areas that rely almost exclusively on ethanol have not experienced any of the water contamination problems found elsewhere in the country where MTBE has been used, he added.