Remedial Costs for MTBE in Soil and Ground Water

Abstract

The contamination of MTBE in ground water has introduced concerns about the increased cost of remediating MTBE/BTEX releases compared to remediating sites with BTEX only contamination. In an attempt to evaluate these costs, cost information for 311 MTBE-blended gasoline release sites was furnished by the USEPA Office of Underground Storage Tanks (OUST) (USEPA, 2000), several states, BP/Amoco, Creek and Davidson (1998), and other sources. The majority of the sites were from South Carolina (183), Kansas (53), and New York (32), with information from sites in Maine, Texas, California, and Illinois also included. The reported information were project costs, actual costs, estimated project costs, or estimated project costs to date and included site assessment costs, capital expenditures, and operation and maintenance expenses. Site-specific cost data, average operation and maintenance expenses, and total project costs for several sites, primarily in California and on the East Coast, were provided by BP/Amoco (Kolhatkar, 2000).