http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR2007081900967.htmlhttp://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/19/AR

Two years after lawmakers put the kibosh on a gas additive that became a national scourge, the country's new recipe for fuel is under the microscope for its potential to cause the environmental problems it was meant to prevent.

While environmental regulators are confident ethanol, non-drinkable grain alcohol, won't create a repeat of the MTBE debacle, questions remain about what it will do when it makes its way from gas stations into the ground.

''You're trading one problem for another,'' said Gary Brown, an environmental engineer and president of Montgomery County-based RT Environmental Services Inc. ''The thought in Pennsylvania is that because people aren't using MTBE anymore, you don't have to worry about MTBE releases coming from tanks … Now you're getting ethanol in water. You're just getting a different kind of contamination.''
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