单项选择题

To meet strict air-pollution standards scheduled to take effect over the next few years, oil companies are racing to make their fossil fuels as pollution free as the alternatives, chiefly methanol and natural gas. Last week Atlantic Richfield, the eighth largest U.S. oil company, said it had developed just such a fuel: a cleaner-burning gasoline that the company claims will cut toxic emissions nearly 50%.
If making a better gasoline is so easy, why hasn’t anyone done it before The simple answer: cleaner fuels are more expensive. A gallon of ARCO’s new gas—ECX—will cost about 16 cents more at the pump than standard gasoline. If ARCO simply passed those charges on to its customers, they would soon find new places to refuel. But the Los Angeles based company knows that California is about to set new fuel standards that will require all oil companies in the state to reformulate their gasoline or switch to alternative fuels. ARCO has no plans to sell ECX until it is ordered to meet the new standards, which will take effect soon.
Producing cleaner gasoline is a matter of improving the refining process. Gasoline is a mixture of as many as 100 carbon-based compounds obtained from crude oil by selectively distilling, i.e. getting rid of various hydrocarbons. ARCO’s goal was to reduce the concentration of pollutant elements. To make ECX, the company’s chemists have to add compounds that cost more to refine.
The cleaner gas has advantages over rival fuels like methanol M85, a mixture of 15% gasoline and 85% alcohol, which costs 25 cents to 40 cents more than standard gasoline. Unlike methanol, ECX can be used in any car without mechanical adjustments or loss of power. As a result, the development could stop the massive switchover to alternative fuels. Switching to such fuels as methanol and natural gas would require retooling the millions of cars built each year and installing new pumps and tanks at 200,000 US service stations. It would also end the cozy auto-fuel monopoly the oil industry has enjoyed for nearly a century.
What are oil companies competing for