Quote:
Originally Posted by GH85Carrera
There was a local site in the city that was the site of an old gas station for many years. Evidently they had a gasoline leak in a tank, and the soil conditions were just right, or just the wrong type is more accurate. The site was sold, and a circuit city was going in. I used to drive past and saw the giant OMG hole they dug to get to all the contaminated soil. The hauled it off, and brought in a lot more new clean dirt. That had to be expensive. Circuit city went away long ago, Now it is is a grocery store.
I heard later the contaminated soil was brought to a burner, and they ran all of it through a large kiln like gizmo, and literary burned all the contaminates out, and were left with "clean" dirt.
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A few decades back, the gubmint passed new regs requiring reformulated gasoline.
The way to meet those regs? methyl tertiary butyl methyl ether, MTBE.
It was an oxygenate that resulted in cleaner burning. A side benefit was slightly higher octane index.
But it was later found to be bad juju
It wasn't listed as a carcinogen but it was suspected to leak from tanks and seep into groundwater really fast and efficient-like, more than other things like gasoline. it was outlawed in the 2000's and the gubmint decided the clean-up rules that in most cases required replacing under ground tanks at stations and often doing zackly what you described. Removal and incineration of the dirt around the tank.
MTBE was replaced with ethanol, which doesn't hurt groundwater or fishes in tiny concentrations like MTBE was said to do (and ethanol doesn't leak through underground tanks like MTBE was said to do).
But ethanol also reduces the efficiency of gasoline resulting in burning more of it to do the same work. Ethanol results in more pollution than it prevents, go figure.
The money spent doing that to gas stations was in the go-zillions, which the consumer paid for at the pumps.
But that really doesn't have anything to do with refineries as MTBE was usually added by the shipper/distributor after the gas left the refinery.