The Hidden Cost of Gasoline

A black, electric-powered Nissan Leaf pulled up to a gas station — not to fuel up, of course. Matthew Metz, the founder of Coltura, a nonprofit trying to speed up the country’s shift away from gasoline, climbed out of his car with printed maps in hand, prepared to give me a tour.

It was a sunny spring day, and the Arco station in North Seattle looked like any other on a busy street corner, with cars fueling up and a line of bored people waiting to buy snacks and drinks inside the convenience store. Metz knows a lot about gas stations, and it changes what he sees. Looking around, he marveled at the risks that everyone was taking, even if they weren’t aware of it. “This is a hazardous materials facility,” he told me.

Drivers pumped their tanks with gas, breathing carcinogens like benzene, the source of gasoline’s signature sweet smell. On the east side of the property, tall white pipes that vent toxic vapors from petroleum kept underground stood just 10 feet away from the window of a childcare center. Hidden below the station is a tract of contaminated soil that extends underneath a neighboring apartment building.

 

The Arco station has a long history of leaking, with petroleum products discovered floating in the septic tank beneath it in 1990. After decades of efforts to remove and break down that pollution — a host of contaminants including lead, benzene, and the suspected carcinogen methyl tertiary-butyl ether — trace amounts remain, with some highly polluted patches in the soil. One sample taken late last year showed levels of gasoline-related compounds 72 times higher than Washington state’s allowable limit.

This Arco station is hardly unique. Almost every gas station eventually pollutes the earth beneath it, experts told Grist. The main culprit: the underground storage tanks that hold tens of thousands of gallons of fuel, one of the most common sources of groundwater pollution. Typically, two or three of these giant, submarine-shaped tanks are buried under a station to store the gasoline and diesel that gets piped to the pump. A large tank might be 55 feet long and hold as many as 30,000 gallons; a typical tank might hold 10,000 gallons. Leaks can occur at any point — in the storage tank itself, in the gas pumps, and in the pipes that connect them. Hazardous chemicals can then spread rapidly through the soil, seeping into groundwater, lakes, or rivers. Even a dribble can pollute a wide area. Ten gallons of gasoline can contaminate 12 million gallons of groundwater — a significant risk, given that groundwater is the source of drinking water for nearly half of all Americans.

As a result, time-consuming cleanup efforts are unfolding all across the country, with remediation for a single gas station sometimes topping $1 million. Leaks are such a huge liability that they’ve led to a high-stakes game of hot potato, where no one wants to pay for the mess — not the gas station owners, not the insurance companies that provide coverage for tanks, not the oil companies that supply the fuel. In some states, polluters have shifted tens of millions of dollars in remediation costs onto taxpayers. Roughly 60,000 contaminated sites are still waiting to be cleaned up, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, or EPA — and those are just the ones that have been found. Washington state has about 2,500 in line, one of the biggest backlogs in the country.

Much of this pollution has been stagnant for decades. Forty years ago, steel storage tanks began corroding, setting off a slow-motion environmental disaster all over the United States. Leaks often weren’t discovered until long after petroleum had poisoned the groundwater, when neighbors of gas stations began complaining that the water from their taps smelled like gasoline. In 1983, the EPA declared leaking tanks a serious threat to groundwater, and Congress soon stepped in with new regulations. One of the largest spills was in Brooklyn, where a 17 million-gallon pool of oil gradually collected beneath a Mobil gas station — a larger spill than the Exxon Valdez disaster in 1989, when a tanker ran aground in Alaska and poured oil into Prince William Sound.

Fast-forward to today, and more than half a million leaks have been confirmed around the country. The Government Accountability Office estimated in 2007 that the total bill for cleanups would top $22 billion. Those old, decrepit storage tanks have left a legacy: overgrown, empty lots that real-estate developers don’t want to touch. Of the roughly 450,000 brownfields in the country, nearly half are contaminated by petroleum, much of it coming from old gas stations.

As the contamination from these spills lingers, underground storage tanks are becoming a problem again as the next generation of tanks — installed in a rush after the old steel ones started breaking — begin nearing the end of their 30-year warranties, when there’s broad consensus they are highly likely to leak. In Washington state, for instance, the average tank is about 29 years old. The tanks at the Arco station in North Seattle were replaced in 1990, soon after contamination was discovered, putting them a few years past the 30-year cutoff. (...)

But states are discovering that many private insurers, which have long hesitated to provide coverage, are even more reluctant as tanks get older. “I don’t think they’re super thrilled to insure them anymore,” said Cassandra Garcia, the deputy director of Washington state’s Pollution Liability Insurance Agency. “This isn’t generally the most profitable business line for them.”

If gas stations don’t have insurance, states can shut them down. This predicament prompted Washington state to adopt a new law this spring providing fully state-backed insurance for gas stations. But critics like Metz wonder whether stations need to be saved at all. With electric vehicles on the rise, Metz thinks that selling gasoline is a dying business. “The whole financial underpinnings of gas stations are starting to crumble,” Metz said.

Gas stations often bear the names of major oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Shell, and Chevron, but that doesn’t mean those companies actually own the stations. Usually, they supply the fuel to independent business owners who signed agreements to sell their products and pay royalties to use their branding. Back in the day, oil companies owned a lot of stations (and thus the tanks beneath them); today, the top five largest oil companies own about 1 percent of gas stations.

The number of stations overall has been in decline for decades thanks to mediocre profits, rising land values in cities, and more fuel-efficient cars. An analysis from Boston Consulting Group found that between 25 and 80 percent of gas stations nationwide could be unprofitable in 12 years — and that analysis was conducted in 2019, before a slate of new policies, including federal tax credits, were passed to promote electric vehicles. Under vehicle-emissions rules unveiled by the Biden administration in April, EVs would make up as much as two-thirds of all U.S. car sales by 2031. Last year, Washington state set a target of ending the sale of new gas-powered vehicles by 2030, just seven years away; it has also adopted California’s stricter deadline of 2035, along with five other states.

That shift could lead to a pileup of vacant gas stations that the existing cleanup programs won’t be able to handle. There are more than 145,000 fueling stations in the U.S., according to the National Association of Convenience Stores. Even if the country manages to break off its century-long attachment to gasoline, the fuel’s legacy may live on in the soil and water. The question of who pays to clean up the contamination is a mess in itself: In theory, station owners are supposed to pick up the tab, but sometimes they’re unable to pay — or unable to be found — when the bill comes due. So then, who pays? 

by Kate Yoder, Grist |  Read more:

Image: Grist/Jesse Nichols