How do you cleanup an oil tank leak?

How much does it cost to clean up a tank leak?

With over 30 years' experience with remediation, we can safely say that a small cleanup of contamination from an oil tank to average between $8,000 to $15,000.00.  These would be considered small remediations

There are various costs associated with the remediation or cleanup of a tank leak.  Most oil tank leaks will require some form of the following:

1   Defining the contamination $3,000 to $5,000.  Also known as delineation and no someone can't just look at the ground and KNOW this information, no one has x-ray vision.

If you have a discharge of contamination you have to do testing to define how far the contamination has spread, this is called delineation.  You are determining the vertical and horizontal extent of the contamination.   You do this by drilling into the ground and obtaining soil samples.

2   Equpment to excavate and load the soil into a truck(s), 1 day 2, days however long it takes add $2,500 to $5,000.  Skilled labor to operate the heavy equipment add $1000 to $3000 depending on how long it takes.

3  Truck soil to disposal facility.  This cost directly relates to how many tons of soil? 22 tons? 100 tons?   $2,000 to $20,000.00

4   Project Manager to coordinate all this, obtain soil samples, write a report to state add $4,000.00.

Now add up those numbers and get a basic remediation cost budget for a leaking oil tank.  Do not discount the cost of cleaning up an oil tank leak.

Large leaks meaning tank leaks that impact groundwater and go deeper than the foundation of the house? Well add in a minimum of $10,000 to support a house and you can spend over $100,000.   Groundwater controls and testing, let's set aside $15,000.

Read further if you want more detail regarding cleanup costs.

Oil heat was popular in the United States from around 1920 to the 1980's.  Oil was stored in tanks made of metal that rusted with age and leaked oil.  Today the responsibility and expense of cleaning up an oil tank leak falls to the property owner, and these cleanups can runs tens of thousands of dollars.   This is why when a property is listed for sale buyers want to know if a tank is present and if it leaked.  We do thousands of oil tank sweeps a year to protect buyers from cleanup expenses.  Click to Learn About Tank Sweeps

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That said you own a property you remove a tank for a sale or just to be  a good person, the tank leaks and you ask yourself  "What do I do after my oil tank leaks?"

Oil tank Remediation Explained

A very simple analogy regarding how to cleanup a leaking tank is to think of the oil that leaked out of the tank as a cancer.   While oil leaks won't kill you, they can hit your bank account pretty hard.  In any event the effort and cost to address a tank leak is 100% related to how much oil leaked out of the tank and what you need to do to extract the oil contaminated soil from the ground.

Don't tell me your tank had just a few small pin holes and not much oil leaked out.  You don't know that nor does the company that removed the tank know that. (I am licensed in 3 states and have removed tens of thousands of tanks and I can't tell you by looking at the tank.   Think about it, if your car had no gas gauge would you know how much gas was left in the tank at any given moment?  No way.

After a tank leaks you delineate the extent, kind of like doing biopsies for cancer.   Once the area is defined, you can develop cost to remediate.

So remediation of a tank leak is akin to cutting out a cancer, meaning you remove soils that have oil in them (oil level is above permissible limits), you take soil samples after soil removal to ensure you got everything, then you replace the removed soil with clean soil and send a report to the State documenting the oil tank leak has been addressed.

This photo shows an oil tank removed from next to a house, you see the soil pile created from removing the tank in the background of the photo.

Here is a better picture of the tank being removed.  You can see the tank was about 5 to 6' away from the building.

So what is necessary to cleanup the tank leak?

First you have to dig out the contaminated soils (You use an excavator to do this). and put them in a truck to be transported to a disposal facility.   As you can see from the next photo the area requiring remediation is nowhere near a paved road where a dump truck could site and be loaded with contaminated soil.

So you need a 2nd piece of equipment to hustle the soil from the house area to the street (the equipment is called a loader).

In this photo you can see the orange loader picking up clean soil to move back to the excavation to backfill the area.

Here the clean fill is being installed in the remedial excavation to replace the removed contaminated soils.

In this photo you can see how the grass is a little worse for the wear since heavy equipment had to go back and forth across the lawn.  Yes the ruts you see in the grass is due to both the weight of the equipment as well as the weight of the soil the equipment carries.  You may ask yourself why do you need an excavator AND a loader why not back the dump truck on the lawn?   Because the truck will get stuck in the soft ground, and if ground does not appear soft, put a heavy dump truck with 22 tons of soil or maybe 60,000 lbs. in total and boom the ground sinks.

So the cleanup of most oil tank leaks will require some form of the following:

1   Defining the contamination $3000 to $5000

2   Equpment to excavate and load the soil into a truck(s), 1 day 2, days however long it takes add $2500 to $5000.  Skilled labor to operate the heavy equipment add $1000 to $3000 depending on how long it takes.

3  Truck soil to disposal facility.  This cost directly relates to how many tons of soil? 22 tons? 100 tons?   $2000 to $20,000

4   Project Manager to coordinate all this, obtain soil samples, write a report to state  add $4000.00

Now add up those numbers and get a basic remediation cost budget for a leaking oil tank.

Large leaks meaning tank leaks that impact groundwater and go deeper than the foundation of the house? Well add in a minimum of $10,000 to support a house and you can spend over $100,000.   Groundwater controls and testing, lets set aside $15,000.

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