Air pollution from oil and gas is causing 91,000 premature deaths and hundreds of thousands of health issues across the United States annually, with Black, Asian, Native American and Hispanic groups consistently the most affected, finds major new study co-led by UCL researchers.
The research, published in Science Advances, and carried out with Stockholm Environment Institute (SEI), is the first to comprehensively quantify the health impacts of outdoor air pollution across all stages of the US oil and gas lifecycle, from extraction to end-use (cars, power plants), as well as to analyse the associated racial and ethnic disparities in exposure and health burden.
In addition, the researchers found that 10,350 pre-term births and 216,000 new cases of childhood asthma per year were attributable to oil and gas air pollution, as well as 1,610 lifetime cancers across the US.
For the study, the research team used advanced computer models to map air pollution from oil and gas activities across the US. They then used this information, along with established health risk data, to estimate the number of severe health outcomes like asthma, preterm birth, and early death.
Lead author, Dr Karn Vohra (UCL Geography, now at University of Birmingham) said: "We used a state-of-the-science air quality model to separate air pollution caused by each major stage of the oil and gas lifecycle from other sources of air pollution. This enabled us to work out and compare health outcomes. What we found was striking: one in five preterm births and adult deaths linked to fine particulate pollution are from oil and gas. Even more concerning is that nearly 90% of new childhood asthma cases tied to nitrogen dioxide pollution were from this sector."
The US has one of the world's largest oil and gas industries but the health impacts and inequities from its air pollution have been poorly characterized. The research quantifies the health impacts of air pollution across all oil and gas lifecycle stages, from exploration, extraction and drilling (upstream), through to compression, transport and storage (midstream), refinement or transformation into petrochemical products (downstream) and consumer end-use.
The researchers found that the final end-use stage, mostly from burning fossil fuels, overwhelmingly contributes the greatest detrimental health burden, accounting for 96% of total incidents linked to the oil and gas sector. The five states that experience the greatest total health burden from all stages are amongst the most populated (California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey). When normalised for population, residents in New Jersey, the District of Columbia, New York, California, and Maryland are subject to the greatest health impacts.
