The hidden cost of gasoline

This story was originally published by Grist and co-published with Crosscut. “The oil companies started to realize that they could be liable for a lot of environmental harm caused by these little gas stations,” said Peter Lehner, who investigated underground storage tank leaks for the Natural Resources Defense Council as well as the New York attorney general’s office in the late 1990s. An undated contract from Texaco, for instance, spells out that the purchaser would agree “to maintain all storage facilities” to prevent spills and “indemnify Seller for all claims, fines and expenses relating thereto.” “I have talked to several gas station owners that have purchased gas stations from Big Oil,” said Ryan Bixby, the managing principal at the environmental consulting firm SoundEarth, who oversees cleanups in Washington state. “We do have a crazy number of impacted sites for being so green, but I wouldn’t say that abandoned gas stations or contaminated gas station sites are really that big of a concern,” she said. In Provo, Utah, 55,000 gallons of gasoline escaped from a storage tank into the soil and groundwater in March 2018; the state’s environmental department called the incident “catastrophic.” In Lily Lake, Illinois, a rural town outside Chicago, a Shell gas station under construction spilled nearly 8,000 gallons of gasoline after heavy rain flooded tanks last April, sending petroleum into a nearby wetland.