Fairbanks Daily News-Miner
Editor:
I attended Dr. Donald Stedman's lecture on oxyfuel, as announced in your March 9 article. Dr. Stedman released results of his study of Fairbanks cars. I noted down a few of these:
He made 465 valid measurements of automobile exhaust. The mean emissions were measured at 0.44% carbon monoxide (CO). The is the lowest ever measured in any city in the world!
Eighty-seven percent of our cars are very clean. The cleanest 70% only contribute 5% of the CO. While the dirtiest 10% of the cars emit 72% of the CO. By fixing the dirtiest 4% (27% of the CO), at several hundred dollars each, we could do more to reduce the CO problem than the oxyfuel could do.
Dr. Stedman pointed out that oxyfuels only make a significant reduction in the CO emissions in the dirty cars. He said that the EPA mandate for the use of oxyfuels in Fairbanks was like the mayor of San Francisco forcing everyone to use AZT because some of the population has AIDS.
During the questions after his presentation. He said that idling of engines, for say 20 minutes, was probably better on the environment than a cold-start. Also, we should check with the fire department to see if there has been an increase vehicle fires since the introduction of MTBE.
I thank Dr. Stedman and the Geophysical Institute of the University of Alaska for sponsoring his lecture.
Let's fix the dirty cars, not exempt them from the IM program. This will solve the CO violation problems without the community being forced to pour millions of dollars worth of MTBE into the 87% of clean cars where effectively it does no good.
Steve Estes
lots more on oxyfuel