Summer Gasoline Bill Passes Senate

• Scott Detrow
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  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

From June to September, drivers in the Pittsburgh area are required to fill up their vehicles with a special blend of gasoline. The goal is to cut back on pollution levels during the hotter summer months. But the closure of Philadelphia-area refineries, combined with soaring gasoline prices, has the General Assembly primed to remove the mandate.
Earlier today, the state Senate approved a bill eliminating the summer blend requirement, as the Tribune-Review reports:

A bill to eliminate a special, and costly, summer-blend gasoline in the Pittsburgh region cleared the state Senate on Wednesday.
The proposal, which must be passed by the state House and signed by the governor before becoming law, would allow Pittsburgh-area motorists to use the same conventional gasoline burned year round in rest of the state, outside of Philadelphia.
“With fuel prices already rising, we need to get this legislation passed before the switch to summer gas,” said Sen. Elder Vogel, R-Beaver County and co-sponsor of the bill. “If we wait, the effects could be catastrophic to the folks in Western Pennsylvania.”

In January the paper published an article explaining the reasoning behind the summer blend requirements, and the arguments for eliminating the law.

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