Air pollution from US oil and gas production costs 7,500 lives a year

Late last decade, the United States reclaimed its spot as the planet’s top oil and gas producer, eclipsing even Saudi Arabia. While using an ever-increasing amount of fossil fuels does buoy American energy independence and save consumers at the pump, this trend has raised questions about the the country’s commitment to going green. Frequently, environmental concerns are the centerpiece of this debate, but domestic oil and gas production also has a human toll. A new study took a stab at quantifying that impact, and the numbers contained in it are alarming.

It was the work of a broad swath of researchers—at Boston University, the University of North Carolina, the Environmental Defense Fund, and the nonprofit Physicians, Scientists, and Engineers for Healthy Energy, all working with the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They estimate air pollution from U.S. oil and gas production costs the nation as much as $77 billion in annual health costs. That’s a monetary figure, the authors state, that exceeds the “estimated climate impact costs from methane leakage by a factor of 3.” But they put the impact in more dire human costs too: 410,000 asthma attacks each year, 2,200 new cases of childhood asthma, and some 7,500 deaths.

Of course, health experts have been warning that methane emissions (40% of which come from the energy sector) are a “major climate policy concern” since forever. Yet lead author Jonathan Buonocore, a public health researcher at Boston University, tells Environmental Health News that previous research into health risks focused on combustion sources like power plants and cars. “Nobody’s looked at the health impacts of extraction,” he explained. “So I decided to do that, and lo and behold, they weren’t small.”

The paper, published in the journal Environmental Health Research, adds that even though there’s a knowledge hole about the total impacts of our ramped-up oil and gas production, plenty of research already pinpoints health problems experienced by people who live near (especially downwind of) refineries and other processing facilities: They variously record worse childbirth outcomes, have more asthma, and suffer higher rates of hospitalizations, cardiovascular disease, and other negative health effects.

Still, the authors note that a major issue for environmental research is establishing causation—how can they confirm that a refinery is responsible for bad health outcomes, versus other factors like the people nearby also living next to a highway full of cars, or preexisting conditions that put residents at risk of respiratory problems?

Buonocore’s team says they leveraged longitudinal epidemiology studies that examined air pollution exposure vis-à-vis other potential contributors, everything from diet, age, race and ethnicity, to personal health histories, where people worked, and whether they smoked. These variable were controlled for, and they mapped air pollution models against data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the U.S. Census on asthma and mortality. This captured the isolated health effects of living near oil and gas production, they argue.

Per their findings, states like Texas where there is a lot of oil and gas production had concerning impact scores, while states like New York and Illinois that have busy, polluted metropolitan areas but not much fossil-fuel production didn’t show the same poor health outcomes. The researchers also included a novel metric in their study: They measured nitrogen dioxide particles in the air, released when fossil fuels burn at high temperatures—and NO2 pollution appears especially well-linked to the negative health impacts, they write.

To get their assessments, the authors had to rely on data collected in 2016. It might therefore seem, given Big Oil’s pledges since then to embrace cleaner energy, that the numbers would have improved over the past seven years. But it’s unclear if that’s the case. Production wasn’t just increasing last decade at a rate to put the U.S. back on top; the global energy crisis that emerged with COVID-19 has also delivered years of record profits to energy companies.

Reports have shown that, in fact, many of the companies have actually walked back their climate pledges. Shell, Exxon, and BP have all done that recently, and in March the Biden administration green lit an $8 billion project in Alaska that will allow ConocoPhillips to drill for decades in America’s largest expanse of untouched wilderness.