What's New in USTs?
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As of September 2022, the national UST program over the last 34 years cleaned up 509,091 UST petroleum releases. This significant milestone of surpassing one-half million UST releases cleaned up means that almost 90 percent of UST releases in the United States are no longer posing the threat of harmful contamination to the public’s health and our country’s soil and groundwater.
National UST Program Cleans Up Over 500,000 UST Releases - EPA collects data from states, territories, and the District of Columbia regarding UST performance measures. Read the End-of-Year FY 2022 (October 1, 2021 through September 30, 2022) report.
UST Performance Measures
- View an interactive timeline about the national underground storage tank (UST) program.
Milestones in the Underground Storage Tank Program's History
- EPA’s Administrator signed a notice of proposed rulemaking regarding E15 labeling on fuel dispensers and UST system compatibility provisions.
Proposed Rulemaking—E15 Fuel Dispenser Labeling and Compatibility with Underground Storage Tanks
- EPA developed UST Finder, a web map application containing a comprehensive, state-sourced national map of underground storage tank (UST) and leaking UST (LUST) data. It provides the attributes and locations of active and closed USTs, UST facilities, and LUST sites from states as of 2018-2019 and from Tribal lands and US territories as of 2020-2021.
UST Finder
- Under the 2015 state program approval (SPA) regulation, the 39 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which currently have SPA, must reapply by October 13, 2018 in order to retain their SPA status. The remaining 15 non-SPA states and territories may apply for SPA at any time.
States Applying or Re-applying for State Program Approval
- The EPA deferred UST systems that store fuel for use by emergency power generators (EPG) from release detection regulatory requirements until the 2015 UST regulation. EPG UST systems contain unique features that are not typically characteristic of UST systems installed at conventional retail gas stations or convenience stores, such as day tanks; return product piping; and long pipe runs that contain both underground and aboveground piping, within building walls, some without transition sumps or separation points that more easily allow testing of the underground piping components, as required by the federal UST regulation. Several new regulatory compliance & implementation resources for emergency power generator UST systems are now available to assist with these unique systems.