The hidden cost of gasoline | Hacker News Reader

The hidden cost of gasoline

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110 pointsjseliger110 comments

> 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.

Remember 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.

Nah, 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.

The chain of events doesn't form a causal relationship that substances in sunblock cause cancer. It just expresses someone might use sunblock more often after the advice from a doctor.

Yes; very self-serving recommendation, isn't it?

No, In mean quite literally the described situation does not have anything to do with whether or not sunblock itself causes cancer. Like a whole paragraph of scenario was provided and then out of nowhere "and then they get cancer from chemicals in sunblock". Which chemicals, specifically? What do we do about the fact that nearly all women are recommended sunblock daily in nearly all beauty regimens for decades and yet facial skin cancers aren't gendered?

Replying to EatingWithForks

> facial skin cancers aren't gendered?

So that also means sunscreen doesn't work either?

Is this claim substantiated? I've seen all sorts of opinions ranging from "use European sunscreens containing non-FDA-approved UVA filters" to "just rub lard on skin, drink raw milk, and lift heavy weights". I feel like chemical sunscreens have been ubiquitous enough for long enough that any correlation in skin cancer rates would have been long pointed out by now.

No, they are an idiot. UV light causes various mutations at the DNA level, which accumulate over time and can lead to skin cancer. Skin cancers have some of the highest number of mutations of any form of cancer.

I can't testify as to Sunscreen, but I can verify the UV thing first hand: my aunt who went to the tanning bed multiple times per week got skin cancer so severe they had to remove a golf ball size piece of flesh from her leg.

There are recent studies going somewhat in that direction. The gist was more or less as follows: - the chemical compounds in sunscreens often break down into potentially toxic/cancer inducing compounds under UV light. YMMV per sunscreen. - metals can be used as UV blocks, and are absorbed by the skin, with potential health risks attached. - the proportion of melanomas in the population groups NOT using sunscreen was indeed higher than in the population groups using sunscreen. HOWEVER,the groups using sunscreen had a prevalence of aggressive melanoma, while the groups not using sunscreen were predominantly diagnosed with the least-aggressive type of melanoma.

You know, things have gotten too easy. In eliminating all the natural problems of the world with abundant food, clean water, medicine, electricity it seems that we can no longer discern cure from disease.

It’s like the vaccine situation. Are vaccines bad for you? Probably a little bit, some of the time. But boy! The horrors of those diseases the vaccines prevent! You do not have to look quite so hard. In some places infant mortality was 30%. Nowadays, 1 in 3 parents are not left grieving before their child reaches 1 and so we forget why we vaccinate our children.

The outrage was that 1. Sunscreen has chemicals which bioaccumulate with use and 2. No testing had been done on sunscreen as it was assumed that it was safe as a topical medication.

Combine that with the fact that sunscreen has not been shown to cause any population wide reduction in skin cancer prevalence and endemic vitamin D deficiency. I think that people have a right to be mad?

Do people really wear sunscreen for cancer prevention and to get more vitamin D? I would imagine it's more about preventing painful ass burns (place hyphen as you wish) and blocking UV skin damage that accelerates aging.

Yes, there are people concerned about skin cancer. For an anecdote, my uncle had skin cancer three times and became very conservative about always wearing hats and sunscreen.

In the Southern Hemisphere (especially the Anglosphere countries due to our heritage of pasty white people), it's to prevent sunburn and especially cancer. Yeah, sunburn sucks, but thanks to the ozone hole that forms over Antarctica and then drifts northwards, melanoma is very high.

And so is the sunburn risk, you can burn in 10 minutes here, but repeated sunburn increases melanoma risk.

It’s seriously grim at times - the burn time drops to 5-10 minutes and you want to mow the lawn. Suncream stinging your eyes you get it done. And you still get burnt, even with it on.

Car paint fades fast and everything plastic or fabric gets destroyed by UV in a year or so.

> Suncream stinging your eyes you get it done

As a ginger, the south sun is my mortal enemy, and I always struggled with sunscreen in the eyes when I got a sweat on hunting or tramping. And of course, all that sunscreen came from somewhere, so I ended up with sweat rivulet shaped sunburn on my forehead.

After trying all the brands I now swear by the Neutrogena 50+ ultra sheer spray on, only one I've found that stays on my forehead and out of my eyes, no matter how hot the day or steep the ridge.

I keep my can of it hidden away lest any of my kids decide to use it instead of the regular lotion because they like the spraying aspect.

The spraying isn't safe, unfortunately, according the FDA. You really don't want your kids to breathe the stuff.

https://www.consumerreports.org/cro/news/2011/07/don-t-spray...

Compressed aerosol one isn’t safe. Ones with squirt handle are ok and great with kids.

I spray it into my hand and rub it on, as my forehead is right above my eyes, and my main goal is to keep my sunscreen out of my eyes!

And I don't want my kids using it at all, it's for my specific purposes, and it's expensive! ;)

Edit I see the "spray it in your hand" approach is what the article you linked suggests. Glad I've adopted harm-minimalising approaches already :D

I swear by Neutrogena too - the roll on pencils are especially good for face as it doesn’t sting as much for whatever reason.

Reading this was a real culture shock. In Australia, people definitely wear sunscreen for cancer prevention.

Here in New Zealand we do too.

> sunscreen has not been shown to cause any population wide reduction in skin cancer prevalence

Have you accounted for all variables? The moral hazard where people stay out in the sun longer when they're wearing sunscreen, the fact that testing shows there are manufacturers with poor quality control leading to significant differences between claimed SPF and actual SPF, have there been any changes in patterns of time spent outdoors over the years, and how about the fact that different cohorts have different rates and trends?

We know that aging increases the risk of cancer, we also know that repeated instances of UV skin damage make skin cancer more likely.

So, have a look at this graph (Figure 2).

https://www.stats.govt.nz/indicators/occurrence-of-melanoma

The rates in the 25-44 cohort, who grew up when health initiatives about "being sun smart" were introduced to school curricula and promoted in the media are lower and trending slowly downwards.

Whereas the rates for boomers with a lifetime of accumulated UV damage are trending upwards as aging leaves them vulnerable to cancer if all kind.

Endemic vitamin D deficiency is going to need a citation, I think. In my country at least, it's only been noted in children who have very high melanin already, and then dress in our local "tough gangsta" style with baseball caps and hoodies with the hood pulled up over the cap, thus drastically reducing the area of skin exposed.

There is a lot of food which can contain benzene. Because it contains sodium benzoate that in some conditions leads to benzene.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sodium_benzoate

A carbon filter for your drinking water will deal with benzene and other organic compounds

The public should never be required to filter out pollution, especially from basic necessities such as water.

Morally sure, but the cost of trusting the authorities on this one is too high.

In most developed areas consumers don’t have to. The utility filters out benzene at the plant and it doesn’t leak into the water supply pipes except possibly during “boil water” advisories which are rolled out when water pressure drops enough for the pipes to leak in rather than only leak out.

Next they need to train all the animals to drink from public fountains

How does benzene impact plants?

It's an electrolyte, so they crave it. /s

Ah yes, let's equip every home with a reverse osmosis machine so oil companies can spill stuff everywhere they please.

Of course that's not what I said. But accidents and spills happen, and there are things you can do to make your water safe(r) if you are worried about it.

I mean, I don’t think it’s necessary because this is filtered by the utility but would adding $1,000 [0] to a home really change the economics of home ownership much? For much more comprehensive filtering for one sink the cost is $250, you’d install this on maybe 2-6 sinks of a home which costs >$300,000.

0: https://www.aquasana.com/whole-house-water-filters/rhino-100...

I'm from a country with no real guarantees about the water supply. Most people only have a filter installed on their kitchen faucet and just avoid ingesting water from any other taps in the house.

Drinking water utilities monitor for benzene. NY claims it is not detected in their drinking supply: https://www.nyc.gov/assets/dep/downloads/pdf/water/drinking-...

>Profits collected, responsibility socialized.

This happens literally any time someone makes a mistake somewhere that doesn’t get caught. It’s not some magic “gotcha” that only applies to these types of industries and anecdotes are not evidence that an industry depends on it.

Here are other examples of people “privatizing the profits while socializing the losses”:

- a bad teacher who doesn’t lose their job for teaching children incorrect things.

- a cook that doesn’t get fired when you get food poisoning.

- a doctor that makes a negligent mistake and causes a permanent injury or death without getting caught.

The examples are endless and scale from individuals up through corporations and governments across every industry and mode of governance.

I recommend you don’t use the phrase if you don’t want to look dumb because it’s a pretty strong indicator of a lack of critical thinking skills.

In all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison. It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news.

>In all of those cases the harm is tiny by comparison.

No, these are all examples where the harm is significant when it’s scaled up to the larger population because they are so common. Bad education accumulates in one of the worst feedback loops of destruction you can get (dumb people vote for more dumb people supporting education focused on dumb things).

>It takes a shockingly small rate of food poisoning at a major chain to become national news.

the vast majority is never traced back to a restaurant because it’s written off as “24 hour flu”. It only makes national news on the rare occasions where it can and is traced back. This is reserved for food poisoning bad enough to cause hospitalization and/or death.

Individual subpar teachers don’t make a huge difference in education due to the redundancy on our education system. Curriculum is designed so if students learn nothing in say 5th grade not much changes. A school system filled with bad teachers is a systemic failure.

Again food poisoning without major consequences isn’t a big deal. Nationwide around 3,000 people in the US die from food poisoning, mostly from poor food safety at home. By comparison air pollution kills around 20-100 thousand people every year in the US, the scale of harm from all forms of pollution is vast but gets rolled up into cancer into a few other diseases so we don’t talk about it much.

PS: Pollution death statistics are really difficult to quantify accurately. Non smoking related long cancers are significant which mean some people who smoke get lung cancer from non smoking related causes. Modeling it is however dependent on what assumptions you make.

You’re talking about deaths and fixating on the wrong thing. Food poisoning causes massive economic harm in just sick days and that’s registered precisely nowhere.

Pollution doesn’t just instantly kill people, it’s again associated with vastly more sick days than food poisoning.

Deaths is just a useful proxy here for all the harm caused by each.

No it’s not. Pollution lands into a distribution of doing nothing or giving people cancer or serious diseases that absolutely do get counted.

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 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.

s/Below/Above/ ?

yes thanks, edited

> 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).

Do you not consider contaminating a city's water supply catastrophic

No, 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.

Its 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.

So make failed businesses empty their fuel tanks? Seems like a dumb reason to regulate tanks for active businesses.

Failed businesses don't often fail because they executed things perfectly. When you bankruptcy and shut down, you don't necessarily sell property immediately.

That’s demonstrably false. Google the red hill fuel tanks

A 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.

Heh, I did some work on a pretty cool tank monitoring hardware/software solution with a major fuel supplier here about a decade ago. They have facilities with about a dozen large vertical 40-80,000L above-ground fuel tanks for agricultural use. One of the features I was working on was leak detection, and we got the sensors and statistical analysis down to the point where, when testing with water, I could accurately detect the rate of evaporation from a smaller indoor tank.

Anyway, we’re in an area that doesn’t have a whole lot of “acts of God” kind of destruction; no hurricanes or earthquakes, high winds occasionally but tornados are quite rare, etc. They reported to me that the number one cause of leaks on their above-ground tanks was bullet holes. Just… people randomly shooting at the tank farms. They don’t catch fire when this happens generally, they just spill out from the hole until someone catches it and transfers all of the fuel out of the tank.

>Anyway, we’re in an area that doesn’t have a whole lot of “acts of God” kind of destruction

Are you in the US? And if so... mind sharing your vague region? I'd love to know where to actually avoid tornadoes.

One example: much of Pennsylvania has none of these.

Philly doesn't count as a natural disaster?

Saskatchewan in Western Canada. Just north of North Dakota and Montana. What we do get is wild amounts of cold and snow some years, but those don't generally harm fuel tanks a whole lot :).

Move to the Southwest. I moved to northern New Mexico and I love it. Nobody to bother me and miles of space for whatever I need to do. Gets hot though.

I 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.

Above 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.

The 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.

Does this happen? Here in NJ underground is now banned, finding a buried tank on your property is an expensive nightmare.

I believe that's only true for heating oil, but not for gas stations' storage of gasoline.

A 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.

Underground 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.

Tornadoes are more likely to ruin an above ground tank.

Tornadoes 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... [2] https://64.media.tumblr.com/64f5e2b83554ea3342a609c64bd8b4dc...

Oil companies don’t own the gas stations.

I mean, you probably answered your own question. Easier to obfuscate or straight up ignore if its completely outta sight, outta mind.

Sulfur and benzene are under a cap-and-trade federal compliance program

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.

So 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.

I 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

Or 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)

Don'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.

Indeed. I think that's sort of what I was saying, but you put it better

In my opinion, everything has a hidden cost, it’s nothing at all related to capitalism, and it’s the fundamental reason why anyone can get anything done.

If you sat down and thought through all the possible consequences of all your actions, you’d never get anything done.

Never getting anything done seems highly underrated then.

A 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.

It'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!

A 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.

It 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?

Not 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.

I see what you mean. That's more interesting than I originally thought.

If a company has a hypothetical 10 barrels of oil on hand, and is given two choices: (1) do no work and sell the 10 barrels; (2) do work, use the 10 barrels, and have 11 barrels left over to sell or use again

Why would the company choose option 2? Option 1 is both easier and results in 10x the immediate value. I suppose over enough cycles (i.e. >10x), the "1 additional barrel per cycle" will add to more net barrels sold to market.

But with any meaningful discount rate, the time value of money would almost certainly be greater for option 1. Maybe fracking was a ZIRP phenomenon.

Aren't you guys just describing how business works?

You have 10 dollars. You can keep the 10 dollars and then have 10 dollars. Or you can invest that 10 and earn 11.

Or, in a real situation:

Walmart had 12B in revenue with 2% profit margin for 2023. It sounds like they started with 11.9B in money, bought inventory and paid their expenses, and after selling everything wound up with 12B.

How is this different to spending oil to make oil?

2 is way way better of an option. You’ve just described a process that grows your resources by 10% each iteration. Unless it was very expensive or high risk, it’s a no brainer.

With option 1 you end up in the old meme of

1. Sell 10 barrels 2. ????? 3. Profit

After you’ve sold the ten barrels, now what? There are no more barrels and no more coming since you chose not to drill. You have to shut down and do something else with whatever money you made from the sale.

> 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.

Well, almost 40% of all ship cargoes are fossil fuels (oil, coal, methane gas):

* https://thelastdriverlicenseholder.com/2022/01/12/almost-40-...

That's called the "energy return on investment" [1] and it's a critical factor in how profitable a fossil fuel source is.

An easily acccessed oil field can easily have an EROI of 20-50, so they spend a gallon worth of energy to extract 20-50 gallons. Shale oil has a EROI as low as 1-1.5 and it's sometimes only worth it when burning the accompanying natural gas for free energy.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_return_on_investment

Eroei analysis usually doesn't go very far down the production process.

What you want is Well to Tank calculations, which suggest that the process of making gasoline accounts for 15-20% of the total GHG emissions, so add 25% onto the number you get from burning the fuel in your car.

Oil companies need to make a profit. If it cost more to produce than to sell, they wouldn't do it.

Some of the energy they use comes from electric.

There are huge barriers to entry. A marginal barrel of oil might “cost” $1 coming out of the ground. If you use 50 barrels refining it and getting it to market, you can still make a profit if that barrel costs the end user $51.

Your analysis is way off and it shouldn’t have even passed the sniff test when you thought it was more gallons consumed than to get you a gallon.

Remember, the helicopter that flies your friend out there just buys jet fuel at a regular airport. With an entire supply line that has to buy the fuel off of the open market, it’s not possible for it to require a gallon of gas to produce a gallon of gas, let alone 10 or 100.

It’s no different than guessing that the process to make 1 potato takes 100 potatoes.

It has to be more extracted than consumed to even have the possibility of a business.

This 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/S03790...

I'm not trying to say it's a good thing, but it's not the huge disaster they are trying to imply.

That 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.

> 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.

Yeah, the planet will be fine, it's just humans and entire ecosystems that will be screwed.

Nothing bad will happen from these leaks, gasoline is very biodegradable. Humans will be unharmed and the ecosystem will be unharmed.

Which bacteria eat benzene specifically?

Pseudoxanthomonas spadix BD-a59, for one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2592918/

This is an interesting study. They identified the species by culturing it from contaminated soil sampled at a South Korean gas station. The study also mentions previously identified bacteria that eat BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene -- closely related hydrocarbons having a single aromatic ring) and explains why there are likely to be many as-yet-unknown BTEX-degrading species.

The short version: "Countless other BTEX-degrading bacteria may be present in the soil or sediment but may not compete well in aqueous slurries or perhaps cannot grow in minimal medium; thus, this alternative pool of BTEX-degrading populations is likely to be overlooked. Our study reinforced this concept."

With the eventual heat death of the universe everything will be inert… in the meantime this stuff can harm you.

bacteria isn’t magic.. it requires the right conditions and time, and depending on the additives and type of soil/clay that process may take a very long time. Oil has been in the ground hundreds of millions of years with being broken down by bacteria.

drinking MTBE, crude oil, or even partial degraded benzene is not good for you.

There’s a reason remediation programs for gasoline stations exist.

If that was true, why do old petrol station lots sit vacant for decades because they haven't been decontaminated yet?

Lead isn't broken down, and that was common in gasoline.

Not everything breaks down, most of what is in modern gas breaks down, but not everything.

Now do the hidden cost of renewables....

Snide 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.

It's not a competition. Just because renewables have hidden costs doesn't make hidden costs of gasoline acceptable.

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