If you felt breathing came a little easier in the summer just past, it wasn`t strictly your imagination. After the scorching summer of 1988, in which the Chicago area violated the federal ozone limits a record 19 times, there were only two such occasions this year-thanks in large part to more sublime weather.
It is amazing what nature can do in healing some of man`s indiscretions. But just as surely, nature can slug right back, so it helps when man lends a hand, too.
The Amoco Corp. plans to lend a hand next summer to help keep those ozone levels down, setting a voluntary example for the other oil companies. Amoco will introduce in northern Illinois and northwest Indiana gasoline formulated with a lower vapor pressure.
That may sound like a technically obscure contribution to cleaner air, but it is an important one. The lower the vapor pressure, the slower gasoline evaporates. The less the evaporation, the fewer the hydrocarbons released into the atmosphere. It is the hydrocarbons-baking in the summer sun-that help form ozone, the principal component of urban smog and a major cause of eye, throat and lung irritation.
The oil companies do not willingly make changes like these because they are expensive; Amoco, for example, has invested $1 million at its Whiting, Ind., refinery to produce the reformulated gasoline. This less volatile gasoline also tends to make cars more balky in cool weather-not exactly good public relations.
But the environmental benefits can be substantial, since vehicle emissions are responsible for about half of the urban smog problem. And with Amoco controlling about 25 percent of the Chicago-area market, the benefit it will create will be more than token.
In a sense, Amoco is anticipating the inevitable. The Illinois Pollution Control Board is heading toward imposing the same lower vapor pressure standard next summer anyway, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is expected to impose one even stricter in 1992. But Amoco is proceeding here regardless, and plans to move the improved gasoline to the rest of its 30-state market in time for the new U.S. standards.
Inevitable or not, that is an exercise in corporate and environmental responsibility, and the same reality must dawn soon on the rest of the oil industry.