Chapter 9: Quantitative Value Assessment from Independent EPA Data

Abstract

Another means for assessing the value of nationwide geological mapping is based on the rationale that contamination mitigation costs, resulting primarily from waste disposal and industrial sites, could be minimized significantly or even avoided had geological information been available and used prior to the potentially detrimental land-use activity. Using this model, quantifiable benefits were potential savings from funds spent by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and private parties from 1994 to 2019 associated with their SuperFund program to clean up some of the nation’s most contaminated land (1,883 sites listed). The USEPA reported total inflation adjusted costs in 2020 dollars of $86,227,531,539. The cost of geological mapping for the 26-year (1994–2019) period was $1.99 billion. Assuming that 5% of the $86.23 billion costs could have been avoided had geological maps at a meaningful scale been available and used to initially locate waste disposal and/or industrial sites (often many years prior to designation as SuperFund sites) in areas with less vulnerability to contamination of land and/or water, that would be a cost savings of $4.3 billion and yield a cost benefit ratio of 2:1. If 10% could have been saved, the cost savings would have been $8.6 billion with a cost benefit ratio increase to 4:1. It is impossible to determine how much of these costs could have been avoided. However, it is instructive to envision that a 2.3% reduction in the $86.23 billion clean-up expenditure would have paid for the entire $1.99 billion geological mapping outlay from 1994 to 2019.

9.1: SuperFund Site Costs

Avoiding costs, and explicitly using them as a measure of benefits, are well documented in the literature. For example, Lizzuo et al. (2019) reported that the Arizona Geological Survey saved Arizonans over $30 million in cost avoidance over a 12-month period, a 30 to 1 ratio relative to its state funding. Chiavacci et al. (2020) reported on the health benefits from using geological data to communicate radon risk potential, and this equated to potential avoidance of Kentucky residents to harmful radon exposure, with a net value of $3.4 to $8.5 million (2016 dollars).

Table 5.5.1. in Chapter 5 lists 73 maps that can be derived from geological maps. Among those are aquifer sensitivity (i.e., pollution potential), groundwater quality, landfill suitability, and geology for land use, all of which can help delineate regions and potential sites where waste disposal and certain industrial activities can have a high potential for contaminating land and water (e.g., Hughes, 1972; Berg et al., 1989). The premise is that by avoiding potentially sensitive areas through geological mapping, municipal, county, and industrial planners can avoid or at least minimize future contamination issues, while taking advantage of land areas where potential contamination would be less of an issue. Although geological mapping at a detailed scale has not been widespread enough to significantly reduce these contamination issues in a country as large as the U.S., this cost avoidance scenario presents the case for the potential benefits of geological mapping in future years. An early assessment of the value of geological mapping, and an example of the above cost-avoidance scenario, was reported by Bhagwat and Berg in 1992. It was based on the rationale that future contamination mitigation costs, resulting primarily from waste disposal and industrial sites, could be minimized or even avoided had geological information been available and used prior to the potentially detrimental land-use activity. For this two-county analysis, cost amounts were direct contractual funds for the geological mapping activity as well as state matching funds. A reliable, quantifiable benefit was the savings from funds spent by the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency to document, investigate the extent of contamination, and take mitigative remedial action. There were nine SuperFund sites within the study area. It was assumed that geological knowledge would not have prevented all mitigation costs. However, some avoidable costs could have been significantly reduced had geology been considered prior to development of the sites that resulted in contamination often decades later. Secondly, it was assumed that the effectiveness of existing environmental regulations played a role in cost reduction, and if regulations were 100% efficient, geological mapping may have been unnecessary. However, the latter can never be attained. To account for these factors, overall benefits were reduced 50%, 75%, and 90%, and this still resulted in cost benefit ratios of 1:23.5 to 1:54.5, 1:11.7 to 1:27.2, and 1:4.7 to 1:10.9, respectively.

The present study obtained considerable benefits data derived from the

4,700 responses to the stakeholder questionnaire. However, the above methodological approach provides another means for assessing the value of nationwide geological mapping. For the 1994–2019 project period, SGS and the USGS reported that their overall geological mapping costs in 2020 dollars were $1.99 billion. Using the model of Bhagwat and Berg (1992), another reliable, quantifiable benefit were funds spent by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) and responsible private parties associated with the SuperFund program. Both maintain responsibility for cleaning up some of the nation’s most contaminated land while responding to environmental emergencies, oil spills, and natural disasters (USEPA, 2022a). While the annual accomplishments of the program and associated remedial costs since 2004 are reported online (USEPA, 2022b), costs prior to 2004 were not available, and funded amounts as reported in the literature were inconsistent with one another and with the USEPA website. Therefore, the USEPA was contacted directly to provide uniform 1994–2019 SuperFund programmatic costs (Personal communication — William Dalebout, USEPA, Budget Planning and Evaluation Branch, January 2022). As noted by the USEPA’s William Dalebout in providing the information, they concentrated on a “more comprehensive pull of expenditures under the Superfund umbrella (e.g., remedial, removal, etc.) and in so doing corrected for some of the overlapping/double counted costs that occurred when summing values from the website (e.g., amounts to states, while reported separately, are accounted for within construction and pre-construction amounts already)”.

The cost numbers include direct USEPA Superfund expenditures, as well as private party commitments for site investigations and cleanup. USEPA expenditures included:

1. Transactions associated with response functions such as clean-up (remediation, removal, etc.) and excludes management and support costs, as well as costs for enforcement activities.

2. Both intramural costs (e.g., payroll, travel, etc.) and extramural costs (e.g., contracts, interagency agreements, cooperative agreements, etc.).

3. All fund types, including those that were congressionally appropriated, reimbursable allocations (e.g., special accounts), from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (ARRA), and from Homeland Security Supplemental funds.

Private party commitments included:

1. Estimated amounts that parties spent on future site investigations and cleanup. The actual amounts spent were unknown.

2. Cash out payments to the USEPA that went into special accounts that the Agency used for government-performed cleanup.

3. Cost recovery that went either into site-specific special accounts for future government-performed cleanup or back to the SuperFund Trust Fund to clean up orphan sites.

As provided by the USEPA, Table 9.1.1 shows their total expenditures in nominal dollars of $29,943,391,516 and private party commitments of $34,686,400,000 for a total of $64,811,791,516 dedicated to SuperFund cleanup and associated activities. It also shows the inflation adjusted costs in 2020 dollars of $86,227,531,539.

Table 9.1.1.

USEPA SuperFund Total Expenditures and Private Part Commitments (in nominal and inflation-adjusted dollars).

9.2: Linking SuperFund Costs to Geological Mapping

As a means of linking SuperFund costs to geological mapping, the USEPA operates an interactive map (Figure 9.2.1) providing specific latitudinal and longitudinal information of the 1,883 National Priorities List (NPL) or SuperFund sites (USEPA, 2022c) reported in 2022, including all those that are deleted, existing, and proposed. Another website provides tables of more state-specific information about those sites (USEPA, 2022d). These websites were used to evaluate if SuperFund sites resided within geological map boundaries using the rationale that contamination mitigation costs could have been minimized or even avoided had geological information been available and used prior to the potentially detrimental land-use activity.

The absence or presence of geological maps in association with SuperFund sites was ascertained using the Interactive Map View function of the USGS National Geologic Map Database (NGMDB) (USGS, 2022). In the absence of geological maps placed in the NGMDB by SGS, or to supplement maps found in the NGMDB with additional maps, websites of SGS were viewed as well. Evaluation of SuperFund site placement within a geological map boundary was restricted to geological maps at scales larger (i.e., finer scale) than 1:250,000, and preferably 1:100,000 or greater. An environmental assessment, or an evaluation of the contamination potential of any site-specific location, cannot be conducted effectively on small-scale maps. For states with 100% of its geological mapping coverage within the NGMDB, or where all of the state’s SuperFund sites were found to have been within an NGMDB geological map coverage, SGS web sites were not consulted.

Following very careful comparing of latitudes and longitudes within geological map boundaries of SuperFund sites, it was determined that 1,384 sites, or about 74%, were contained within geological maps at scales larger than 1:250,000, and about 75% of those were within geological maps at scales greater than 1:100,000. It was not surprising that the largest states of Alaska, Texas, and California would not have conducted much of their mapping at larger scales. Only 35 SuperFund sites in Texas and California out of a total of 184 were located within the larger-scale maps. However, and surprisingly, 8 of 10 sites in Alaska were located in regions of more detailed mapping. States completely covered by larger-scale geological maps include the smaller states of Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey, as well as the larger states of Florida, Kentucky, Ohio, North Dakota, and Washington. Maine, Montana, and Louisiana are close to full coverage.

Figure 9.2.1

U.S. EPA Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) sites (USEPA 2022c). Yellow dots are existing sites. Green dots are deleted sites. Red dots are proposed sites (Accessed Feb. 10, 2022). States are color coded based on numbered USEPA regions, which do not reflect the regions defined in this cost-benefit analysis (see Figure 8.1.1).

9.3: Perspectives on Mapping Costs, Perceived Values, and SuperFund Clean-Up Costs

The $1.99 billion cost (2020 dollars) of geological mapping throughout the U.S. for the 26-year (1994–2019) period was accompanied by an inflation adjusted $86.23 billion of SuperFund clean-up and remediation costs by the USEPA and private parties. Assuming that 5% of those costs could have been avoided had geological maps at a meaningful scale been available and used to initially locate waste disposal and/or industrial sites (often many years prior to designation as SuperFund sites) in areas with less potential to contaminate land and water, that would be a cost savings of $4.3 billion and yield a cost benefit ratio of 2:1. If 10% could have been saved, the cost savings would have been $8.6 billion with a cost benefit ratio increase to 4:1. Although it is impossible to determine how much of the costs could have been avoided, it is instructive to envision that a 2.3% reduction in the $86.23 billion clean-up expenditure would have paid for the entire $1.99 billion mapping expenditure.

This SuperFund analysis presents a cost avoidance scenario showing potential savings had geological maps been available and used prior to the siting of these high-pollution sites. It supplements previously discussed (Chapters 4 through 7) input from stakeholders and map generating agencies that provided data on geological mapping expenditures, stakeholders willingness to pay for one geological map, and how they assess map value, all of which show very positive benefits over costs. Stakeholders indicated that they would willingly pay $2,883 to $3,000 for one geological map, but they assessed its value to be $10,000 to $11,062 per map. Using the median amount that respondents expected to pay per map as the basis ($2,883), the cumulative range of values between the actual maps downloaded and sold (4,825,955 as shown in Tables 7.2.1 and 7.6.2) with the extrapolated amounts (7,148,106 as shown in Table 7.6.2) would be between $13.91 and $20.61 billion. The most conservative value estimates thus range between 6.99 and 10.35 times the expenditure. Finally, the data on maps sold or downloaded from the computerized databases serve to constrain the cumulative total amount stakeholders would willingly pay as well as their total map-value assessment. The overall results show not only that geological maps provide critical, essential knowledge for every activity in the country’s economy and civic life, but also that all indicators show the creation of geological maps to be a highly rewarding function of public spending.

9.4: References

Berg, R.C., Wehrmann, H.A., and Shafer, J.M., 1989, Geological and hydrological factors for siting hazardous or low-level radioactive waste disposal facilities: Illinois State Geological Survey, Circular 546, 61 p.

Bhagwat, S.B. and Berg, R.C., 1992, Environmental benefits versus costs of geologic mapping: Environmental Geology and the Water Sciences, vol. 19, no. 1, p. 33–40.

Chiavacci, S.J., Shapiro, C.D., Pindilli, E.J., Casey, C.F., Rayens, M.K., Wiggins, A.T., Andrews, W.M., and Hahn, E.J., 2020, Economic valuation of health benefits from using geologic data to communicate radon risk potential: Environmental Health, Article number 36, https://doi.org/10.1186/s12940-020-00589-8.

Hughes, G.M, 1972, Hydrogeologic considerations in the siting and design of landfills: Illinois State Geological Survey, Environmental Geology Notes 51, 22 p.

Lizzuo, C., Bartels, A., Brands, C.C., and Yashi, A., 2019, Arizona Geological Survey economic impact report: Arizona Geological Survey Contributed Report OFR-19-A, 21 p., https://azgs.arizona.edu/publication/arizona-geological-survey-economic-impact-report.

U.S. Geological Survey, 2022, The National Geologic Map Database, https://ngmdb.usgs.gov/ngmdb/ngmdb_home.html (February 2022)

U.S. EPA, 2022a. SuperFund: https://www.epa.gov/superfund (February 2022).

U.S. EPA, 2022b, Superfund Remedial Annual Accomplishments: https://www.epa.gov/superfund/superfund-remedial-annual-accomplishments (January 2022).

U.S. EPA, 2022c, Superfund National Priorities List (NPL) Where You Live Map: https://epa.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappviewer/index.html?id=33cebcdfdd1b4c3a8b51d416956c41f1 (February 2022).

U.S. EPA, 2022d, Search for Superfund Sites Where You Live, https://www.epa.gov/superfund/search-superfund-sites-where-you-live (February 2022).