In March, prompted by rising concerns over groundwater contamination, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) called for a phaseout of methyl-tert-butyl ether, or MTBE, a chemical added to gasoline to reduce carbon monoxide (CO) pollution. The 1990 Clean Air Act requires that gasoline sold in polluted urban areas contain oxygen additives. This "oxygena-tion" supposedly promotes complete ...

In Catalonia (northeast Spain), a monitoring program was carried out to determine methyl tert.-butyl ether (MTBE), its main degradation products, tert.-butyl alcohol (TBA), tert.-butyl formate (TBF), and other gasoline additives, the oxygenate dialkyl ethers ethyl tert.-butyl ether, tert.-amyl methyl ether and diisopropyl ether and the aromatic compounds benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylen...

In this study, evidence for two novel metabolic processes catalyzed by a filamentous fungus, Graphium sp. strain ATCC 58400, is presented. First, our results indicate that this Graphium sp. can utilize the widely used solvent diethyl ether (DEE) as the sole source of carbon and energy for growth. The kinetics of biomass accumulation and DEE consumption closely followed each other, and the molar...

We studied customer exposure during refueling by collecting air samples from customers' breathing zone. The measurements were carried out during 4 days in summer 1996 at two Finnish self-service gasoline stations with "stage I" vapor recovery systems. The 95-RON (research octane number) gasoline contained approximately 2.7% methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), approximately 8.5% tert-amyl methyl eth...

Growth of Aquincola tertiaricarbonis L108 on the fuel oxygenates methyl tert-butyl ether (MTBE), ethyl tert-butyl ether (ETBE) and tert-amyl methyl ether (TAME), as well as on their main metabolites tert-butyl alcohol (TBA), tert-amyl alcohol (TAA) and 2-hydroxyisobutyrate (2-HIBA) was systematically investigated to characterize the range and rates of oxygenate degradation by this strain. The e...