Last year Stanwell Park’s Ted Pickering AM campaigned for months to fix a local eyesore – the redundant petrol station at 54 Lawrence Hargrave Drive. A retired Liberal Party politician, he was concerned about both the Stanwell Park site and a rise in the number of redundant petrol stations and contaminated sites.
“The situation is expected to worsen with the rise of electric vehicles,” he wrote.
“I firmly believe that retrospective legislation is urgently needed to hold the fossil fuel industry accountable for remediating these sites.”
To find out more, the Flame spoke to an expert on contaminated site remediation, Professor Faisal Hai from the School of Civil, Mining, Environmental and Architectural Engineering at the University of Wollongong.
He said, “When a site ceases to be the petrol station, it’s the responsibility of the person who had management and control of the facility to make sure it is properly decommissioned. If it is not decommissioned in a timely way and contamination is detected later, when the original operator of the facility can no longer be identified, it then becomes the landowner’s responsibility to clean up.
“Proper decommissioning may include removal of the underground tanks or at least emptying the tanks. Removal of the tank is the EPA-preferred option as it allows for a more thorough investigation of any contamination remaining at the sites. The operator needs to check the tanks didn’t leak while they were embedded in the soil.”
Professor Hai said the operator and land owner would need to report any leakage found during efforts to remove underground petroleum tanks to their local council and the NSW Environment Protection Authority (EPA).
“The EPA would investigate and ask [the owner] to clean up the site. Very briefly, cleaning up may mean you excavate the affected soil. Then that soil is transferred to an industrial landfill site to dispose properly and then refill that site with a known source.”
“If it is a larger scale remediation study – then it could also mean using some other technologies. The petroleum products are volatile. Technically, volatile compounds are those which tend to remain in vapour phase under normal temperature and pressure. So this vapour extraction could be done by suction pumps. The standard technology is called soil vapour extraction (SVE). There are a few other technologies that are available to remediate petroleum product contamination.”
Professor Hai said the cost could be anything from $100,000 to $1 million, maybe more.
“If the contamination was found to have reached the groundwater, then it requires further elaborate processes. So it is expensive.”
The Stanwell Park servo went out of service more than 20 years ago.
“I’m not sure why it fell through the cracks,” Professor Hai said, “but it still remains the responsibility of the landowner to properly decommission that site.
“There appears to be some regulatory gaps to compel an operator or landowner to decommission a legacy service station unless pollution has been detected.”
While the site is an eyesore – so much so that the Stanwell Park community crowd-funded a muralled wall to hide it from view during 2022’s UCI Road World Championships – it is not thought to be hazardous.
An EPA spokesperson said: “The EPA isn’t aware of any evidence that the site is contaminated or poses a threat to the environment.”
As the regulatory authority, Wollongong City Council said it was working with the current owners. “We have undertaken a number of inspections of the site and have, to date, found no evidence of any immediate safety risk, surface contamination or pollution,” a spokesperson said. “We will continue to provide advice to the owners on how they can maintain the site.”
Of Ted’s campaign to make the fossil fuel industry pay, Professor Hai said he was not aware of a similar campaign succeeding anywhere else.
He said: “I can understand the sentiment – that petroleum companies are selling the product and then they should be responsible. However, our Contaminated Land Management Act tells us that the operator is responsible during operation and at decommissioning, but if the site was not decommissioned in a timely way and the operator can no longer be identified, it is the owner of the land who is responsible.”
However, he said it was not uncommon for industry members to come together to form a fund to help remediate sites contaminated by their products.
“As a part of corporate social responsibility, many companies do take this sort of step … So I think that’s something that may be proposed and may be more acceptable to the companies.”
According to RealEstate.com.au, the 867 m² site at 54 Lawrence Hargrave Drive has changed hands five times since 1997 and was last sold for $550,000 in 2015. Establishing ties to a particular fossil fuel company is difficult. ExxonMobil Australia, Viva Energy and Shell have all said they have no records of owning this site.
A Viva Energy spokesperson said: “We have no evidence this site was ever owned by Viva Energy or Shell. Viva Energy always fully complies with any remediation requirements in relation to legacy service station sites."
Regarding the possibility of an increase in redundant service stations in NSW due to the rise of EVs, UOW’s Energy Futures Network Director, Ty Christopher, said the Stanwell Park site was likely an exceptional case, rather than a sign of a coming crisis.
“Have some faith in the legislation," he said. "There are obligations on all of these companies that own and buy petrol stations to remediate them at the end of life.
“And if not, they’ll be fined and sued.”
A more likely scenario, he said, was that owners would remediate old petrol stations, fit them out with solar panels and EV charging infrastructure, and change their business model to sell more high-priced groceries.