Chevron Products Company and Tosco Corporation retained MathPro Inc. conducted an analysis to assess the potential economic benefits of the Feinstein-Bilbray bill, which would have eliminated the oxygen requirement for federal RFG produced in California. The bill would have increased refiners' flexibility in producing gasoline for the federal RFG areas of California.

In particular, the study estimated the extent to which California refineries could reduce their costs of complying with an MTBE by producing two types of CaRFG2 - one blended with ethanol and the other containing no oxygenate. (This work was an extension of a refining analysis that MathPro Inc. had recently completed for the California Energy Commission.)

The analysis produced estimates of the refining cost savings associated with progressively larger shares of the CaRFG2 pool being blended without oxygen, in both the intermediate term (no new refinery investments) and the long term (new refinery investments as needed), and for three different (assumed) price levels for ethanol.

Chevron and Tosco published the results of the study and presented them to staff members in both Houses of the U.S. Congress.