MTBE phaseout: A boon for ethanol producers As the nation moves toward phas­ing out methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE) in gasoline, ethanol is emerging as a potential replace­ment in reformulated gasoline (RFG). Such an outcome poses questions about ethanol produc­ers' readiness to meet the ex­panded demand.

Ethanol's use as an oxygenate in RFG is well established, as it is used in 17 states and Washington, DC. Its biodegradability in the en­vironment, insist those in the ethanol industry, makes it a safer gasoline additive man MTBE. Terry Jaffoni, ethanol commercial direc­tor of Cargill, Inc., who spoke in February at the Clean Fuels 2000 conference held in San Diego, CA, discounted any problems associ­ated with ethanol's solubility in groundwater, saying, "The only thing you are going to end up with ethanol in the water is a lot of happy fish." She noted also that because ethanol contains twice as much oxygen per volume as MTBE less ethanol is required to mpp t

the oxygen requirement A recent U.S. Department of

Agriculture report, Economic Analysis of Replacing MTBE With Ethanol in the United States, con­cluded that ethanol could suc­cessfully replace MTBE nation­wide by 2004—with negligible effects on gasoline prices and no disruption in supply. In another recent report, Ability of the U.S. Ethanol Industry To Replace MTBE, John Urbanchuk, executive vice president of AUS Consultants, a consulting firm serving industry and utilities, found that the con­struction activity due to the switch to ethanol will add $11.7 billion to the nation's gross domestic product bv 2004 and create more than 47 800 new jobs

At the Clean Fuels 2000 con­ference, Leslie Watson, an inter­national energy consultant with Purvin & Gertz, Inc., cast doubt on ethanol producers' and refin­ers' readiness "to get into this MTBE-free environment". As EPA Administrator Carol Browner is urging Congress to amend the

vjiean /\ir /\ct to eliminate ivi i jjii from the fuel supply and to re­place it with renewauie fuels, particularly ethanol (see accom­

panying story on p. 208A), ethanol producers need to make the necessary investment in ex­panding production capacity. "If we don't see any kind of invest­ment from the ethanol producers, it could really drive the cost up [for oil refiners], come year-end 2002," Watson said.

Jaffoni contends that the transi­tion between MTBE- and ethanol-blended RFG may not be as prob­lematic as refiners envisage, referring to Getty Petroleum Mar­keting, Inc.'s recent switch to etha-nol-blended RFG as "seamless". According to Tancred Lidderdale, refining industry analyst at the U.S. Department of Energy's Energy Information Administration, cur­rent ethanol production capacity is 110,000 barrels per day. If MTBE and other ethers were banned na­tionwide, an estimated 91,000 bar-rels-per-day ethanol shortfall would occur Lidderdale said. This estimate however does not in­clude the 400-600 million gallons

of ethanol that could be brought on line through plant expansions and new plants within 1-2 years, said Bob DeNeen, vice president of the Renewable Fuels Association.

Despite the needed $1.9 billion investment, Urbanchuk assesses ethanol production capacity as more than exceeding the demand within two years. —LEONA A. KANASKIE

The production of ethanol, a corn-based fuel additive, will likely increase with the phaseout of MTBE.

Quantifying the benefits of biodiversity could help prevent extinction A National Research Council (NRC) report that shows human activities are driving the near-term extinction of between one-third and two-thirds of all species is among the most urgent warn­ings from scientists about the rapid loss of biodiversity.

Nature and Human Society: The Quest for a Sustainable World, released in March, warns that loss of biodiversity could lead to eco­system collapse, calling for imme­diate action to account for the full economic costs of resource exploitation. Human population growth and destruction of natural resources have boosted the rate of extinction of living organisms to somewhere between 1000 and 10,000 times greater than natural

background rates of extinction, explained Stuart Pimm, ecologist at Columbia University's Center for Environmental Research and Conservation and one of the au­thors of the NRC report. If current trends continue, this will be the sixth major extinction in the planet's history, rivaling the mag­nitude of the episode that exter­minated the dinosaurs some 70 million years ago, he said. In as few as 50 years, we can expect to see widespread extinctions in fragmented habitats, with biodi­versity in the tropics hit hardest, Pimm concluded.

If we start throwing away the components of ecosystems, we will eventually lose their services, and "we're unlikely to duplicate

MAY 1, 2000 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS • 2 0 5 A

Environmental News

what nature already supplies," said Gary Meffe, editor of Conser­vation Biology at the University of Florida-Gainesville. A team of economists and ecologists re­cently estimated the value of goods and services from biodiver­sity at $33 trillion per year, com­pared with a global gross national product of $28 trillion, said Nor­man Meyers, a conservation biol­ogist at Oxford University.

But the current economic sys­tem, which privatizes profits from use of natural resources but makes society pay the cost of en­vironmental cleanup and restora­tion, does not recognize the value and has driven much of the ex­tinction crisis, according to Michael Bean, director of the Wildlife Program for Environmen­tal Defense, an environmental organization. "Loss of biodiversity

is the result of a lack of clear eco­nomic incentives to conserve biodiversity," he said.

Providing new market-based mechanisms, such as ecotourism, to conserve biodiversity is ex­pected to be a top priority at this month's Convention on Biodiver­sity meeting in Nairobi, Kenya, said Hans Verolme, project direc­tor of Bionet, a nonprofit organi­zation. —JANET PELLEY

Internet tool reaches beyond politics to address climate change In hopes of spurring more busi­nesses to address climate change, the Global Environmental Manage­ment Initiative (GEMI), a nonprofit alliance of large businesses con­cerned about environmental is­sues, unveiled in March a Web-based tool to help companies evaluate their sources of green­house gas emissions.

GEMI created the tool "regard­less of science and policy" be­cause of the worldwide signifi­cance of climate change, said Richard Guimond, vice president of Environmental Health and Safety for semiconductor manu­facturer Motorola, Inc., and chair of GEMI's Climate Change Work Group. "This is an issue that all

businesses must eventually come to grips with," Guimond added. The tool debuted the same week that General Motors Corp. be­came the third major auto com­pany to defect from the Global Climate Commission, a nonprofit organization that opposes the 1997 Kyoto Protocol on Climate Change.

For environmental organiza­tions, the new tool "is another really promising signal that the debate on climate change has shifted—businesses are no longer talking about whether or not we should act, but how we should act," said Elizabeth Cook, codirec-tor of the nonprofit World Re­source Institute's Management

Institute for Environmental and Business, an organization that provided input for the tool's creation.

The advice proffered by the in­teractive tool, which resides on the Web at www.businessandclimate. org, might appear fairly elementary to some observers. For example, the site's self-assessment survey asks users whether they use powerful greenhouse gases like perfluorocarbons (PFCs) or sul­fur hexafluoride (SF6). Any com­pany that uses those compounds is probably very aware of their cli­mate change impact; after all

U.S. semiconductor compa­nies set a goal more than four years ago of reducing its PFC

2 0 6 A • MAY 1, 2000 / ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY / NEWS