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ST. LOUIS — Replacing thousands of lead pipes in the city within the next decade, as required by a new federal mandate, will cost tens of millions of dollars, according to early estimates.

And City Hall doesn’t know how it will pay for all of it.

“We’re still reviewing exactly what’s going to need to be done and what the funding side looks like,” city spokesperson Rasmus Jorgensen said on Thursday.

After nearly a year of deliberation, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finalized a new policy this week requiring the nation’s drinking water providers to remove virtually every lead line in the ground.

President Joe Biden hailed it as public health breakthrough, greatly reducing Americans’ exposure to a neurotoxin that is particularly dangerous to infants and children. “We’re finally addressing an issue that should’ve been addressed a long time ago in this country,’’ he said.

But it’s going to be expensive. And it’s a bit of a curveball for St. Louis, which has until now focused mostly on mitigating the risk from lead pipes with chemicals rather than yanking pipes out of the ground.

One thing is for certain: There are plenty of lead service lines, which take water from city-owned water mains into private homes and are technically owned by customers. A recent analysis by the Natural Resources Defense Council, an environmental advocacy group, estimated the city has the .

Experts . But officials here say that for more than 20 years, the city-owned water department has successfully mitigated the risk by treating its water with chemicals that minimize the absorption of lead from pipes. They say testing has shown the treatment has kept lead levels in customers’ homes well below the new federal limit, 10 parts per billion, announced earlier this week.

The city has made some effort to identify lead lines, and officials know there are about 9,000 service lines with lead and about 46,000 without. But that leaves about 58,000 with a status of “unknown.”

It wasn’t until late July that the city set aside $200,000 in federal money to hire a contractor to go through historical records and fill out its inventory.

Jorgensen, the city spokesperson, said the city has not been removing any lead service lines because the city doesn’t own them.

That stands in contrast to some colleagues. In St. Louis County, Missouri American Water Co., a private firm, has spent millions of dollars since 2017 replacing customers’ lines as it updates adjacent water mains. In July, company leaders said they had replaced about one-third of the problematic pipes they think exist there, knew where to find another one-third, and were asking customers for help finding the rest.

But Missouri American has had the money to pay for removal work, and the ability to recoup it from its 350,000 customers in St. Louis County.

The city’s water department, meanwhile, has been strapped in recent years, going more than a decade without a rate hike until last year and burning through reserves to maintain regular operations and aging infrastructure.

The EPA estimated in late 2020 it would cost between $2,500-$4,000 to replace each customer-side service line. If that’s true, the cost of replacing only the 9,000 or so lead service lines known to the city would be at least $22 million and as much as $36 million — or nearly half of the water division’s budget this year.

Federal officials have set aside $15 billion to assist the nationwide effort, and said Thursday that another $2.6 billion would be made available, including $40.5 million for Missouri. But it also estimated total costs could be as much as $30 billion over the next decade.

Jorgensen, the city spokesperson, said the water department has applied for $5 million in federal money held by the state for lead line replacement.

The water department will also be reaching out early next month to customers whose lines contain lead or unknown material.