降燃油含硫量抗空污 美通過車輛廢氣排放新標準

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency today finalized a rule intended to reduce air pollution from passenger cars and trucks by lowering the allowable sulfur content of gasoline and setting new vehicle emissions standards.

The Tier 3 vehicle standards reduce both tailpipe and evaporative emissions from passenger cars, light-duty trucks, medium-duty passenger vehicles, and some heavy-duty vehicles.

The final fuel standards will reduce gasoline sulfur levels by more than 60 percent – down from 30 to 10 parts per million (ppm). Reducing sulfur in gasoline enables vehicle emission control technologies to perform more efficiently.

Under the Tier 3 program, gasoline cannot contain more than 10 parts per million of sulfur on an annual average basis by January 1, 2017. These gasoline sulfur standards are similar to levels already being achieved in California, Europe, Japan and South Korea.

New low-sulfur gas will provide “significant and immediate health benefits,” says the EPA, because every gas-powered vehicle on the road built before these standards will run cleaner – cutting smog-forming nitrogen oxide emissions by 260,000 tons in 2018.

By 2018, EPA estimates the cleaner fuels and cars program will annually prevent between 225 and 610 premature deaths. Once fully in place in 2025, the new standards will help avoid up to 2,000 premature deaths per year and 50,000 cases of respiratory ailments in children.

The final standards will cut soot, smog and toxic emissions from cars and trucks. The Obama Administration’s actions to improve fuel economy and reduce greenhouse gases from these same vehicles will also result in average fuel savings of more than $8,000 by 2025 over a vehicle’s lifetime.

The EPA expects the final standards to provide up to 13 dollars in health benefits for every dollar spent to meet the standards.

The sulfur standards will cost less than a penny per gallon of gasoline on average once the standards are fully in place in 2025, the agency says. The vehicle standards will have an average cost of about $72 per vehicle in 2025.

While the auto industry, environmental and public health groups support the new standards, the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, opposes them.

The API says the new rule could require $10 billion in capital costs to refineries, and carry an annual compliance cost of $2.4 billion, equating to a potential cost increase at the pump of between six cents and nine cents per gallon of gasoline produced.

EPA Administrator Gina McCarthy takes issue with API’s cost increase projection. She told reporters on a conference call today that it is based on “an outdated estimate.” Current estimates indicate the increase in cost at the pump would average about six-tenths of a cent per gallon in 2025 when the standards are fully phased in, she said.

But people will see immediate benefits in 2017, said McCarthy, with more efficient catalytic converters on the vehicles.