Oil companies agree to $28 million settlement in Tahoe MTBE case

Sac Bee ^ | 8/5/02 | ANGELA WATERCUTTER Associated Press

[NormsRevenge]

A San Francisco court approved a settlement Monday under which oil companies will pay $28 million to end a case involving pollution of Lake Tahoe groundwater with the gasoline additive MTBE.

Shell Oil Co., Shell Products Co., Equilon Enterprises LLC and Texaco Inc. agreed to settle with the South Tahoe Public Utilities District and formalized their deal Monday in San Francisco Superior Court.

[NormsRevenge]

Shell Oil Co., Shell Products Co., Equilon Enterprises LLC and Texaco Inc.

How much have they donated to GraYouT? This is getting off cheap. MTBE doesn't just go away by itself yaknow. I think I saw a number that thousands of ground wells are poisoned by MTBE. Yet it is still in our gas today as GraYouT reigns.

In fact, the Guv extended the length of time , this "additive" can be used be fore being phased out. That's what GraYouT needs to do is "phase out".



GO SIMON

[NormsRevenge]

A Slow Day PING

[NormsRevenge]

PING

[Vidalia]

"Shell Oil Products US announced in June that it would join other suppliers and stop using MTBE in gasoline sold in California by the end of 2002.

And so should the rest of the petroleum industry when anything Californian in origination comes to the forefront.

California will scream and holler about the lack of Vaseline, but who would care?

How about a little logic.

If there were no MTBE additive, then this suit would not have been adjudicated.

Again, the Enviros got what they legislated, now they go for more litigation when they find out their original "save the world" bullsht is exactly that.

They are covering each end of their bass-ackwards mentality with the help of thousands of opportunistic plaintiffs attorneys.

The answer to this nonsense is spelled T-O-R-T--- R-E-F-O-R-M, ladies and gents...

[Abcdefg]

I am under the impression that the EPA forced the oil companies to use MTBE, and worse, that it doesn't clean the air.

[Graewoulf]

The nice thing about all this is that the 28 million dollar "fine" will be added to the price per gallon that residents of California and Nevada pay at the pump.

It couldn't happen to a more deserving bunch of people!

[NormsRevenge]

MTBE is a strange story. It is a by-product of the refining process.

The oil companies desire for profit at all cost sometimes blinds them to the greater good of the people it is selling products and serivces to.

Simon needs to kick him in the yaknow whats with MTBE and DioXin every chance he can. GraYouT will string this out thru his 2nd term if he can.

[Who dat?]

I am under the impression that the EPA forced the oil companies to use MTBE, and worse, that it doesn't clean the air.

I don't remember the exact chain of events, but I was under a similar impression: that the oil companies were required to formulate a mixture that would achieve the (supposed) desired results and that the EPA approved it...

[jimkress]

You are correct. The EPA and CARB FORCED the oil companies to use MTBE but the oil companies are the ones left holding the bag. There should be criminal charges filed against the EPA and CARB employees that forced the oil companies to poison the ground water. For the record, the oil companies did not want to use MTBE.

[Abcdefg]

Ed Wallace has an automotive show on KLIF and he has said that MTBE was tested in Ft. Worth before implimentation and was found to be worthless for ozone pollution, but was forced on the oil companies anyway. Probably a political (money) reason for it.

[TheBattman]

Yep- pretty amazing. The government requires MTBE, but then allows the companies that are REQUIRED to use it to be sued for the USE of the same.....

The dangers of MTBE and it's dubious ability (or lack thereof) have been known for quite some time. It seems I remember a liberal TV expose show reporting on this at least 8 years ago.

Wouldn't this be somewhat akin to filing a lawsuit against a Doctor for administering a required vaccine that subsequently made a child sick?

[Abcdefg]

In a better, more rational world, some bureaucrats and politicians would be swinging at the end of a rope.

Hey, that might make a good tag line!

[CalConservative]

You are both somewhat correct. The California Air Resources Board (CARB) came up with the requirements for California Reformulated Gasoline II (RFG II), but MTBE was one option to meet the eight chemical requirements of the RFG II formulation. Ethanol and methanol, not as abundant and more costly but also not a product of the oil refining process, were the other options. For the record, the RFG II formulation has some rather difficult chemical requirements to meet as the chemical requirements in some cases conflict with other, which makes it a tough balancing act.

In the end, however, both CARB and the oil companies are to blame. CARB for pushing a gasoline formulation of dubious value in reducing air problems and the oil companies for zeroing in on the bottom line for pushing MTBE when they did not have adequate information on its chemical qualities in groundwater.

For the record, MTBE is not a known carcinogen and is only listed as a possible carcinogen on the basis of some toxicity testing done in Italy that produced testicular cancer in rats of a variety that is not correlable to humans. The real rap on MTBE is not its health issues but that it makes water taste and smell bad at relatively low concentrations.

Also, in my opinion as a consultant that works on these underground storage tank leak cases, if we had used ethanol or methanol, we would be dealing with those as the issue instead of MTBE. The real problem is with tank systems that leak. If your tank system does not leak, it really doesn't matter what you put in it.

[Jimbaugh]

 MTBE - A BRIEF OVERVIEW



MTBE is an acronym for Methyl-tertiary-butyl-ether. It is a gasoline additive that has been in wide use since the Clean Air Act of 1990 mandated that MTBE or other oxygenates be added to gasoline. Most oil companies choose to use MTBE and according to the State of California's paper entitled "Public Health Goal For Methyl-tertiary-butyl-ether in Drinking Water" since 1997 it has become the second most heavily produced chemical in the United States (roughly 16 gallons per capita is produced each year)! According to Water officials interviewed on 60-Minutes, one cup of MTBE (about the same amount found in each gallon of gasoline) can contaminate five million (5,000,000) gallons of water and make it undrinkable.

Unfortunately MTBE is now turning up in wells, underground aquifers, lakes and reservoirs. 60-Minutes' Steve Kroft revealed that MTBE is now the second most common water contaminant in the country. One internal study conducted by Chevron discovered that MTBE had contaminated the ground water at 80 percent of the sites the company tested. Remarkably, there is no requirement that local governments, municipalities and water providers to test for the presence of MTBE contamination.

In March of 1996, the city of Santa Monica California discovered that MTBE had contaminated 7 of its 11 wells. The water in these wells took on a strong chemical odor and simply became undrinkable. The wells were closed and today Santa Monica spends about $3 million dollars per year to obtain water from the Colorado River. Since then, the state of California has identified 10,000 sites where MTBE is present in groundwater. MTBE has now been detected in the ground water of 49 states including major cities such as Atlanta, Albuquerque, Dallas, Denver, Hartford, Las Vegas, Long Island and others. In South Lake Tahoe, California MTBE was discovered in the lake, the groundwater and in a dozen wells. One third of the city's water was shut down. They are now suing 12 local gas stations, 12 major oil companies, and several manufacturers of MTBE according to Victor Sher, an attorney representing the city. 60-Minutes' Kroft conveyed that in New Jersey, it has been found in 65 public drinking water supplies and in Long Island New York, MTBE has leaked from more than 400 gasoline storage tanks and is now being detected in more than 100 public water supplies. Glennville, California had some of the highest levels of MTBE ever recorded in drinking water. One well tested at 20,000 parts per billion, 1,000 times greater than the maximum level the EPA is now recommending. Today, Glennville has become a virtual ghost town.

Dr. Bernard Goldstein, a toxicologist and the director of the Environmental and Occupational Health Sciences Institute in New Jersey says, "anyone who looked at the chemical properties of MTBE would have known it was going to pollute water". He explained that the oxygen in MTBE makes it more soluble in water than almost anything else found in gasoline. It moves rapidly in groundwater once it gets spilled. In a report issued by Dr. Peter Garrett of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection and two of his colleagues stated that "MTBE moved further and faster in groundwater and was more difficult to clean up than any other contaminate in gasoline". The problem is that MTBE doesn't break down. Craig Perkins, director of public works for Santa Monica stated "What we found was that it was behaving much differently than contaminants that-that (sic) we had tracked in the past. It was moving through the-the (sic) groundwater into the wells much more quickly. On one of our wells, the-it (sic) essentially doubled within one-week period".

A 1987 EPA memo states "Known cases of drinking water contamination have been reported in four states, affecting 20,000 people. It's possible that this problem could rapidly mushroom due to leaking underground storage tanks. The problem of groundwater contamination will increase as the proportion of MTBE in gasoline increases." The Clean Air Act of 1990, which mandated the use of oxygenated fuel additives, was passed three years later. Bob Perciasepe, an assistant administrator of the EPA told 60-Minutes "any optimism anybody had that we could manage the potential problem has not come to fruition, and before this becomes a national crisis, before this gets worse, we need to change the way we make clean-burning gasoline".

MTBE, can cause water to take on a chemical odor similar to that of turpentine or paint thinner. A study conducted in Italy on lab animals showed that ingesting high doses of MTBE caused leukemia, lymphoma and testicular cancer. MTBE has not been adequately tested for toxicity in humans and scientific data on the human health effects of MTBE in drinking water is sadly lacking.

[CalConservative]

A study conducted in Italy on lab animals showed that ingesting high doses of MTBE caused leukemia, lymphoma and testicular cancer. MTBE has not been adequately tested for toxicity in humans and scientific data on the human health effects of MTBE in drinking water is sadly lacking.

There have been at least three other tests of MTBE's toxicological properties and none of them have found to cause cancer in situations that are analogous to human situations. That is why MTBE is listed as a possible carcinogen.

If you think MTBE is tough to get out of groundwater - and I know how hard it is because that is what my company does - wait until we start trying to clean up ethanol and methanol, which are alcohols and much more soluble in water than MTBE. The problem is still the tank systems that leak, not necessarily what is in them. Gasoline itself contains compounds that are much more toxic than MTBE - benzene for instance, which is acutely toxic at low levels. MTBE, however, is the constituent that is present in the highest amounts in the RFG II formulation - up to 10 - 15 percent of most gasoline sold in the state of California. Couple that with tank systems that leak and MTBE's solubility, you can see where the problem lies.

MTBE does degrade/attenuate in the subsurface, but much more slowly than hydrocarbon compounds. Bacteria will break it down, but usually only if hydrocarbons are not present which would present a preferable "food" source, but MTBE does not adsorb onto soil particles the way hydrocarbons do. What we see is mixed hydrocarbon and MTBE plumes on sites where leaks have occurred, but off-site the hydrcarbon concentrations decrease fairly rapidly in most cases, leaving MTBE-only plumes. The MTBE plumes can be three to four times the size of the hydrocarbon plumes or even more in some cases.

[CalConservative]

Glennville, California had some of the highest levels of MTBE ever recorded in drinking water. One well tested at 20,000 parts per billion, 1,000 times greater than the maximum level the EPA is now recommending. Today, Glennville has become a virtual ghost town.

I am also familiar with the Glennville situation since I am the project manager on the contract to provide an alternate water supply to the community. I am very familar with the distribution and concentrations of MTBE at Glennville since we had to evaluate the possible plume migration pattern to identify source areas of fresh water which would not become impacted by MTBE. Also, we identified residences to hook to the potential water system on the basis of present and future projections on the distribution and concentrations of the MTBE plume. The whole thing is an interesting story but anywhere in the league of the South Lake Tahoe problem. Incidentally, MTBE is only one issue at South Lake Tahoe - they also have serious issues with tetrachloroethene (PCE) in the same part of town and several water supply wells have also been shut down due to PCE issues.

[Jimbaugh]

I don't want to drink MTBE or PCE. Get it out of the GAS NOW. Is that too simple for Conservatives.

[CalConservative]

I don't want to drink MTBE or PCE. Get it out of the GAS NOW. Is that too simple for Conservatives.

The point is, in case you missed it, that there are a lot worse things out there in our water that we aren't doing anything about because we are chasing after a chemical (MTBE) that is relatively benign health-wise. It gets the headlines. How about the benzene in the gasoline - what do you want to do with that? It is much more toxic than MTBE.

The other issue is that if the tanks did not leak, there would be no problem no matter what was in the tanks. We keep band-aiding the problem instead of dealing with the real issue.