"Our air quality and water quality are both extremely important," Lugar said. "It is clear that MTBE is on its way out. The question is, what kind of legislation" is needed now. Lugar has introduced legislation, that has passed the Senate and is supported by the administration, to increase research to create biofuels from almost anything that grows, including agricultural wastes, weeds and much municipal waste.

The chemistry for the actual process is known, Lugar says, but the legislation is needed to bring affordable biomass ethanol to the market. The bill also would establish a $49 million a year research effort over six years involving national laboratories, universities and industry.

"Our problem, in terms of national security and the security of our whole economy, revolves right now on our dependence on petroleum based fuels," he continued. "This is something that we will not be able to get around very easily, but our failure to do very much about it over the course of the next few years will lead us once again to the kind of pass we’ve had in the last few days – not national hysteria but approaching it. This illustrates how vulnerable we are. We will be very vulnerable again and again until finally we have an extraordinary problem that causes a recession or worse still a war."

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA), the committee’s ranking Democrat, is preparing to introduce a bill to tighten air quality performance standards in the Clean Air Act’s reformulated gasoline program and maintain and enhance ethanol’s "rightful opportunity" to deliver clean air benefits.

Oil companies "hijacked the reformulated gasoline oxygen requirement," says Harkin, and rejected ethanol, choosing MTBE for nearly 90% of the RFG market. In a short time, he added, MTBE became the country’s second most common water contaminant and has been detected in ground water of 49 states.

There are "two critical tests for any legislation," said Harkin: it must maintain and preferably exceed all of the clean air, public health and environmental benefits in current law, and must ensure a future for ethanol use that is "fully equal to or greater than" now provided.

R. James Woolsey, former director of central intelligence who now serves as chairman of the advisory committee of the Clean Fuels Foundation, told the committee that as long as the ethanol industry uses only "the tiny share of the world’s plant life that comprises starch and natural sugar, it will never grow to reach even toddler stage." The ethanol industry now could replace about 1% of the nation’s gas supply.

Corn provides almost all the starch for ethanol and so there is a certain amount of "understandable corn-envy" outside the Midwest, Woolsey said. That’s "a natural resistance to paying a federal subsidy for a product when the financial benefits of its use flow almost entirely to the states that produce large amounts of corn and to the small number of companies that process most of the corn into ethanol."

Woolsey called for more use of biomass for ethanol production. "There have now been exciting developments of genetically engineered biocatalysts that can break biomass down into various sugars and ferment the latter to produce ethanol." He called for "a major coalition"of support for biomass for ethanol production.

Reducing or eliminating MTBE "in no way diminishes the continued role for other oxygenates," said Robert Perciasepe, assistant administrator at the Environmental Protection Agency. So the Clinton Administration is recommending that Congress replace the 2% oxygenate requirement in the Clean Air Act with a renewable fuel annual average content for all gasoline at a level that maintains the current use level of renewable fuel – 1.2% of the gasoline supply – and allows for sustained growth over the next decade.