8 ms·
The hidden cost of gasoline
- jmclnx 3y agoI never understood the move of gas tanks from above ground to underground. The few stations left with above ground tanks were forced to bury them ages ago. To me, you can easily detect leaks if above ground and correct. The local Gov can even hire someone to check above ground tanks. Seems oil companies did the move to avoid inspections.
- aeternum 3y agoAbove ground seems more dangerous from an exposed tank point of view. A car could run into it, debris from a wind storm or natural disaster, foul play. These could be mitigated with some kind of containment structure but then you require more land area and investment.
- xenomachina 3y agos/Below/Above/ ?
- aeternum 3y agoyes thanks, edited
- tivert 3y ago> I never understood the move of gas tanks from above ground to underground. The few stations left with above ground tanks were forced to bury them ages ago. > To me, you can easily detect leaks if above ground and correct. The local Gov can even hire someone to check above ground tanks. Seems oil companies did the move to avoid inspections. Above-ground tanks might be better for detecting leaks, but I'd imagine they're much more vulnerable to catastrophic accidents (e.g. a truck slamming into one and causing a giant fire).
- wak90 3y agoDo you not consider contaminating a city's water supply catastrophic
- ars 3y agoNo, because that's not something that actually happens due to underground storage. The leaks are local, and cause minimal long term harm. They are not "contaminating a city's water supply", that's simply not true.
- atshane253 3y agoIts absolutely true, one of my city's primary aquifers is directly under ground. Future underground tanks will not be permitted because they've been leaking into the groundwater, especially if and when they're abandoned because the business failed.
- kortilla 3y agoSo make failed businesses empty their fuel tanks? Seems like a dumb reason to regulate tanks for active businesses.
- smileysteve 3y agoFailed businesses don't often fail because they executed things perfectly. When you bankruptcy and shut down, you don't necessarily sell property immediately.
- semicolon_storm 3y agoThat’s demonstrably false. Google the red hill fuel tanks
- AnimalMuppet 3y agoA truck slamming into an above-ground tank could easily contaminate a city's water supply, so I'm not sure you've got a valid argument here.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- landemva 3y agoI have been to many industrial sites, and oil/gas/diesel tanks have been above ground. Some had bollards to block physical bumps. Many had spill containment knee walls. There are probably regulations depending on type of tank and contents to allow these private tanks. Above ground does make identification of a leak more rapid.
- 13of40 3y agoAbove ground tanks also have the benefit of being gravity fed, so you can use them in rural areas without a power supply or complex pumping equipment.
- landemva 3y agoThe tanks for fresh product (gas/diesel) which I saw had 220v electric pumps and were outside. Some had meters like a gas station to track usage to a machine. Fresh oil tanks were pneumatic. Used oil tanks were pumped out by the service truck. OSHA regulated. Free-standing tanks for fresh product which are in rooms (drifts/bays) underground (mines) seem to be pneumatic with small tanks using a rotational hand pump simply because not a lot of whatever is being used. MSHA regulated. (Never call used oil "contaminated".) Maybe farmers use gravity? As an aside, I happened to recently see a setup 2/3 mile underground with two free-standing used oil tanks. One was marked "abandoned in place" because someone realized if both tanks fail when full, the retaining wall would not contain all of the used oil.
- rr808 3y agoDoes this happen? Here in NJ underground is now banned, finding a buried tank on your property is an expensive nightmare.
- evanelias 3y agoI believe that's only true for heating oil, but not for gas stations' storage of gasoline.
- cameldrv 3y agoA small airport I used to fly out of switched to an aboveground tank when the old underground one was found to have a leak. The permitting and construction costs for an underground tank were much higher with double walls and I believe sensors to detect leaks. The rationale was exactly as you say -- with an aboveground tank you can easily see fuel leaking out and fixing a leak is also very easy by comparison.
- bluGill 3y agoUnderground tanks are best thought of as indoor tanks these days. They build an underground room, put the tanks in and then inspect them visually, and the room collects any leaks. Not always of course, but that is a common way to do them.
- Broken_Hippo 3y agoTornadoes are more likely to ruin an above ground tank.
- limitedfrom 3y agoTornadoes are very uncommon in the west coast of US (also, much of the Northeast and the rest of the world)[1][2] [1] https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/Content/Images/StaticPageImages/map-tornado_risk.png https://hazards.fema.gov/nri/Content/Images/StaticPageImages... [2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/64f5e2b83554ea3342a609c64bd8b4dc/tumblr_pzawcx6z2K1rasnq9o1_1280.jpg https://64.media.tumblr.com/64f5e2b83554ea3342a609c64bd8b4dc...
- kortilla 3y agoOil companies don’t own the gas stations.
- Obscurity4340 3y agoI mean, you probably answered your own question. Easier to obfuscate or straight up ignore if its completely outta sight, outta mind.
- refibrillator 3y ago> The benzene content of typical gasoline is 0.76% by mass (gasoline composition). A spill of 10 gallons of gasoline (only 0.1% of the 10,000 gallon tank, a quantity undetectable by manual gauging and inventory control) contains about 230 grams of benzene. The EPA’s Maximum Contaminant Level (MCL) for benzene is 5 parts per billion (ppb), or 5 micrograms per liter, in drinking water. The density of gasoline is about 0.8 g/mL, so the benzene in a 10 gallon gasoline leak can contaminate about 46 million liters, or 12 million gallons of water > 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 Yikes, never heard about that. Yet another negative externality slipping through the cracks. Profits collected, responsibility socialized.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- dzhiurgis 3y agoRemember the outrage last year when some sunscreen was found to have few PPM of benzene? The outrage from that FUD and people stopping use of sunscreen altogether likely caused more damage than benzene itself.
- NoZebra120vClip 3y agoNah, sunscreens are way more harmful than sun exposure itself. It's the sunscreen that will cause the cancer eventually. Here's the chain of events: young patient gets bad sunburn, sees doctor. Doctor sympathizes and warns patient of dire consequences of not using sunblock 100% of the time. Patient agrees and mostly uses sunblock for several decades, forgets a few times and gets more sunburns. In fact, patient is way more likely to be exposed to powerful sunlight because of the invincibility conferred by sunblock. Patient gets cancer from substances in sunblock, and feels terribly guilty for not using it because a few sunburns must have given her skin cancer.
- 3y ago
- derbOac 3y agoSo many economic analyses of social and environmental problems are full of these "hidden cost" factors, and they're baked into why so many things occur in the first place. "Capitalized profit, socialized risk" is just one example but they all fall into a broader category, of scenarios where enormous costs or dependencies are just ignored or hidden. I might go so far as to argue that large segments of societal economics are based on this dynamic, and might be the achilles heel of modern capitalism.
- TeMPOraL 3y agoI generally agree, though I'd like to add a similar caveat I posted earlier on another thread[0]: those are all relatively recent problems. Like, e.g. petroleum chemistry and chemical industries only started in the earnest in the last 150 years. Chemical leaks and ground water contamination became an issue roughly half-way between then and today. We only have a decent ability to detect such leaks and measure their health impact for half as long still. It may be that the main reason we're discovering so many externalities and bad second-order effects buried in everything that makes for a modern life, is because it's only recently that sciences and engineering progressed enough to allow detecting and quantifying those issues. -- [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36472880 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36472880
- Arn_Thor 3y agoOr were industrialization introduced resource extraction and use on a scale where these externalities are readily noticeable. (Exceptions apply, I’m sure. Maybe some ancient Roman mine tailings poisoned a city at one time but either no one made the connection or it wasn’t written down or we just haven’t found those records)
- TeMPOraL 3y agoDon't lose sight of the exponent. Whatever happened in the early years of industrialization, is mostly a rounding error compared to today. So is what happened 100 years ago. Even the obvious things, not requiring advanced science or sophisticated tools to interpret, could go unnoticed for long and suddenly become noticeable now, simply because of scale and accumulation.
- grecy 3y agoA buddy works on offshore rigs around the world, and it got me thinking. I wonder, for every one gallon of gasoline I pump into my vehicle, how many were used to extract, refine, transport, store and pump it. I'm assuming it's at least 10 to 1. Maybe even 100 to 1 I bring this up because the company will fly him from anywhere in the world to where they want him to work, chopper him out to the rig, etc. etc. All of that gas consumed to get ONE worker onto the rig.
- ars 3y agoIt's easy enough to calculate: Check the cost of producing the fuel, and then calculate how much fuel you can buy (in bulk) for that much money. It won't be exact, but it'll be pretty close. And the number is higher than you might expect!
- barelyauser 3y agoA car will make 10 MPG and tow thousands of pounds. You can tow two pounds thousand of miles. And consider most of the route is made by very efficient boat, pipeline. It will not get even close to 1 to 10. Closer to 1 to 1.
- fleetwood 3y agoIt seems unlikely the ratio of (oil consumed by production):(oil production) is greater than 1:1. If it was greater than 1:1 - e.g. 10:1 - wouldn't the production company simply sell the 10 barrels instead of using the 10 barrels to produce and sell 1?
- inertiatic 3y agoNot really. You need to drill to make any oil. So if you drilled and spent 10 parts to make it happen (flying people there, energy to drill etc.) and extracted 11 parts, you're selling 1 of those and then using the next 10 to mine the next 11 to get another 1 to sell. It would still make sense economically as long as you were turning a profit overall (so factoring the total cost into what you're actually selling), although it would be a huge waste in absolute terms. I do doubt that would be a realistic estimate though.
- ars 3y agoThis isn't as big of an issue as they make it seem. Bacteria will rapidly degrade the gasoline: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0379073815001176 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S03790... I'm not trying to say it's a good thing, but it's not the huge disaster they are trying to imply.
- rgbrenner 3y agoThat paper says you need to collect soil samples quickly so you can classify the type of ignitable liquid that contaminated the soil. It does NOT say the soil is nontoxic and safe; or that it does not need to be cleaned up; or that it won't contaminate ground water. Those degraded compounds are still toxic af.
- ars 3y ago> Those degraded compounds are still toxic af. No they aren't. They degrade (eventually) to just water and CO2. That was not the only paper on the topic, there are tons more. I picked that one because it highlighted just how quickly bacteria consume the gasoline. Gasoline and oil are natural products that will completely and harmlessly biodegrade, they only cause trouble when collected in bulk, but do not have long-term harmful effects once they are diluted, because bacteria completely consume them.
- antiquark 3y agoNow do the hidden cost of renewables....
- ttyprintk 3y agoSnide comments aside, you’re free to post your favorite analysis. But, the externalities of coal outweigh everything mentioned in this thread. I bet the most common type of Superfund site is BTEX in groundwater, but the greatest widespread effect is coal.
- limitedfrom 3y agoIt's not a competition. Just because renewables have hidden costs doesn't make hidden costs of gasoline acceptable.
- Runepika 3y agoSulfur and benzene are under a cap-and-trade federal compliance program https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/gasoline-sulfur-benzene-credits https://www.epa.gov/gasoline-standards/gasoline-sulfur-benze... Has been very successful in reducing sulfur in road fuel down to <10ppm. Not sure if it's possible to even move gasoline over 3.8% benzene today.