IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/cdl/agrebk/qt8635h897.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

The Social Costs of an MTBE Ban in California

Author

Listed:
  • Rausser, Gordon C.
  • Adams, Gregory D.
  • Montgomery, W. David
  • Smith, Anne E.

Abstract

In the early 1990s, oxygenated gasoline was hailed as a partial solution to the nation’s air quality problems. Although the large-scale use of methyl tertiary butyl ether (MTBE) as a gasoline oxygenate successfully improved air quality, it adversely impacted water quality and dramatically exposed leaking underground storage tanks. However, removing MTBE from gasoline could impose significant societal costs—in terms of both gasoline production costs and prices and possible air and water quality impacts. The analysis conducted for this report is based on a comprehensive and internally consistent cost-benefit framework and includes several cost categories largely neglected in prior MTBE analyses, including: (1) the cost to taxpayers of increased ethanol consumption; (2) increases in the cost of oil imports; (3) the effects of changes in gasoline prices on gasoline consumption and thus on automobile emissions; and (4) the potential effect of MTBE substitutes on water quality.

Suggested Citation

  • Rausser, Gordon C. & Adams, Gregory D. & Montgomery, W. David & Smith, Anne E., 2005. "The Social Costs of an MTBE Ban in California," Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley, Working Paper Series qt8635h897, Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics, UC Berkeley.
    • Handle: RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt8635h897
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/8635h897.pdf;origin=repeccitec
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Colin A. Carter & Gordon C. Rausser & Aaron Smith, 2017. "Commodity Storage and the Market Effects of Biofuel Policies," American Journal of Agricultural Economics, Agricultural and Applied Economics Association, vol. 99(4), pages 1027-1055.
    2. Colin A. Carter & Gordon C. Rausser & Aaron Smith, 2011. "Commodity Booms and Busts," Annual Review of Resource Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 3(1), pages 87-118, October.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Social and Behavioral Sciences;

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:cdl:agrebk:qt8635h897. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Lisa Schiff (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/dabrkus.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.