That simplification, they say, would help avoid regional shortages and accompanying price spikes. The effort is aimed at eliminating some of the 15 types of gasoline now in use because of differing federal, state and local clean-air standards.
Fuel supplies are relatively short and gasoline futures are near an all-time high.
Meanwhile, a White House task force under Vice President Dick Cheney is about to release a new national energy policy. Ethanol's influential backers in the Senate include Finance Committee Chairman Charles Grassley of Iowa, Agriculture Committee Chairman Richard Lugar of Indiana, Minority Leader Tom Daschle of South Dakota and Tom Harkin of Iowa, ranking Democrat on the Agriculture Committee. Officials of the petroleum industry, environmental groups and several states last year discussed simplifying the gasoline situation. The key to a compromise was removal of a federal requirement that fuel sold in nine large urban areas must have a higher oxygen content to burn cleaner. The only feasible oxygenates are ethanol and a petroleum industry compound called MTBE, which has found to be toxic.