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Environmental Justice in Unconventional Oil and Natural Gas Extraction: A Critical Review and Research Agenda
Abstract
The drilling phase of oil and natural gas development is a growing area of environmental justice (EJ) research, particularly in the United States. Its emergence complements longstanding EJ scholarship on later phases of the oil and gas commodity chain, such as pipeline transport, refining, and consumption. The growing scholarly attention to the EJ implications of drilling has been prompted by the surge in development of unconventional oil and gas resources in recent decades. More specifically, the oil and gas industry's adoption of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (a.k.a., "fracking" or "fracing") as methods for extracting oil and gas from a wider range of geologic formations has simultaneously heightened oil and gas production, brought extractive activities closer to more people, intensified them, and made well pad siting more flexible. Here, we provide a critical review of the novel EJ research questions that are being prompted by these on-the-ground changes in extractive techniques and patterns, propose an interdisciplinary conceptual framework for guiding EJ inquiry in this context, discuss key methodological considerations, and propose a research agenda to motivate future inquiry.
... While there are sometimes debates about race versus class in environmental justice studies, we suggest that research shows that both often matter, and that community social disruption is theoretically relevant in both cases (Pellow, 2016). Further, social structures restrict the economic benefits and differentially allocate environmental risks experienced by communities, which relates to housing and geographical position (Kroepsch et al., 2019). As socio-economic status increases, perceptions of fracking risk and community social disruption decrease. ...
... Our findings have implications for environmental justice. We are not the first to link concepts of environmental justice to undesirable land uses, such as hydraulic fracturing wells and overall unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development (Been, 1994;Kroepsch et al., 2019). However, we are the first that we are of aware to explore the impacts of fracking communities who also experienced induced seismicity on perceptions of community social disruption. ...
... While previous literature has noted that residents living near hydraulic fracturing wells (and sites of induced seismicity; see often complain that the externalities associated with the extraction process harms the community and causes them stress (e.g., Aryee et al., 2020) there have been few investigations that have examined the heterogeneity of perceptions of community social disruption within these communities. We find distance to fracking wells is important in shaping perceptions of community social disruption, but that not all members of a community perceive the risks and outcomes of hydraulic fracturing equally (Clough, 2018;Kroepsch et al., 2019). This is important for two reasons. ...
... Plugged and abandoned wells may also be harmful to health, due to emissions of non-methane volatile organic compounds (Solis, 2022;Williams et al., 2021). Several studies have reported worse health outcomes among racially and socioeconomically marginalized people living near oil and gas development, and, in several regions in North America, marginalized communities have disproportionately high exposure to wells and associated infrastructure (Caron- Beaudoin et al., 2018Beaudoin et al., , 2019Beaudoin et al., , 2022Casey et al., 2019;Cushing et al., 2020;Gonzalez et al., 2020;Gonzalez, Nardone, et al., 2022;Kroepsch et al., 2019;Proville et al., 2022;Tran et al., 2020Tran et al., , 2021. ...
... Land-use decision-making for extractive industries such as oil and gas involve many factors, including geological, economic, and policy considerations, particularly land-use policies at municipal, county, and state-levels (Kaufmann & Cleveland, 2001;Kroepsch et al., 2019). Prior studies indicate that racially and socioeconomically marginalized populations have less capacity to influence local land-use policy and prohibit siting of industrial environmental hazards in their neighborhoods (Ash et al., 2013;Cushing et al., 2015). ...
... Possible mechanisms leading to observed disparities in exposure to oil and gas development and associated health outcomes emerge from regulatory and land-use decision-making processes involving multiple stakeholders (Kroepsch et al., 2019). In the current study, we observed distributive injustice, with disproportionately high exposure among racial and socioeconomically marginalized people. ...
People living near oil and gas development are exposed to multiple environmental stressors that pose health risks. Some studies suggest these risks are higher for racially and socioeconomically marginalized people, which may be partly attributable to disparities in exposures. We examined whether racially and socioeconomically marginalized people in California are disproportionately exposed to oil and gas wells and associated hazards. We longitudinally assessed exposure to wells during three time periods (2005-2009, 2010-2014, and 2015-2019) using sociodemographic data at the census block group-level. For each block group and time period, we assessed exposure to new, active, retired, and plugged wells, and cumulative production volume. We calculated risk ratios to determine whether marginalized people disproportionately resided near wells (within 1 km). Averaged across the three time periods, we estimated that 1.1 million Californians (3.0%) lived within 1 km of active wells. Nearly 9 million Californians (22.9%) lived within 1 km of plugged wells. The proportion of Black residents near active wells was 42%-49% higher than the proportion of Black residents across California, and the proportion of Hispanic residents near active wells was 4%-13% higher than their statewide proportion. Disparities were greatest in areas with the highest oil and gas production, where the proportion of Black residents was 105%-139% higher than statewide. Socioeconomically marginalized residents also had disproportionately high exposure to wells. Though oil and gas production has declined in California, marginalized communities persistently had disproportionately high exposure to wells, potentially contributing to health disparities.
... The costs and benefits of UOGD operations may not be equally distributed among affected populations. A growing literature on environmental justice is concerned with the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens among populations of different sociodemographic backgrounds (Mohai et al. 2009, Banzhaf et al. 2019a, Kroepsch et al. 2019. Environmental justice, as defined by the US EPA, can be both distributive and procedural, both of which are relevant to UOGD. ...
... Environmental justice, as defined by the US EPA, can be both distributive and procedural, both of which are relevant to UOGD. Distributive environmental justice, in the context of UOGD, examines whether populations exposed to UOGD operations are correlated with indicators of social inequality while procedural justice goals focus on how citizens' rights influence decisions that affect them (see Kroepsch et al. 2019 for a review of the environmental justice and UOGD literature). Many researchers have found that various vulnerable populations are disproportionately exposed to UOGD, including Hispanics , African Americans (Zwickl 2019), and low-income households (Kroepsch et al. 2019). ...
... Distributive environmental justice, in the context of UOGD, examines whether populations exposed to UOGD operations are correlated with indicators of social inequality while procedural justice goals focus on how citizens' rights influence decisions that affect them (see Kroepsch et al. 2019 for a review of the environmental justice and UOGD literature). Many researchers have found that various vulnerable populations are disproportionately exposed to UOGD, including Hispanics , African Americans (Zwickl 2019), and low-income households (Kroepsch et al. 2019). The results, however, are inconsistent among the various dimensions of inequality. ...
The shale gas boom revolutionized the energy sector through hydraulic fracturing (fracking). High levels of energy production force communities, states, and nations to consider the externalities and potential risks associated with this unconventional oil and natural gas development (UOGD). In this review, we systematically outline the environmental, economic, and anthropogenic impacts of UOGD, while also considering the diverse methodological approaches to these topics. We summarize the current status and conclusions of the academic literature, in both economic and related fields, while also providing suggested avenues for future research. Causal inference will continue to be important for the evaluation of UOGD costs and benefits. We conclude that current economic, global, and health forces may require researchers to revisit outcomes in the face of a potential shale bust.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Resource Economics, Volume 13 is October 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
... The costs and benefits of UOGD operations may not be equally distributed among affected populations. A growing literature on environmental justice is concerned with the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens among populations of different sociodemographic backgrounds (Mohai et al. 2009, Banzhaf et al. 2019a, Kroepsch et al. 2019. Environmental justice, as defined by the US EPA, can be both distributive and procedural, both of which are relevant to UOGD. ...
... Environmental justice, as defined by the US EPA, can be both distributive and procedural, both of which are relevant to UOGD. Distributive environmental justice, in the context of UOGD, examines whether populations exposed to UOGD operations are correlated with indicators of social inequality while procedural justice goals focus on how citizens' rights influence decisions that affect them (see Kroepsch et al. 2019 for a review of the environmental justice and UOGD literature). Many researchers have found that various vulnerable populations are disproportionately exposed to UOGD, including Hispanics , African Americans (Zwickl 2019), and low-income households (Kroepsch et al. 2019). ...
... Distributive environmental justice, in the context of UOGD, examines whether populations exposed to UOGD operations are correlated with indicators of social inequality while procedural justice goals focus on how citizens' rights influence decisions that affect them (see Kroepsch et al. 2019 for a review of the environmental justice and UOGD literature). Many researchers have found that various vulnerable populations are disproportionately exposed to UOGD, including Hispanics , African Americans (Zwickl 2019), and low-income households (Kroepsch et al. 2019). The results, however, are inconsistent among the various dimensions of inequality. ...
... Examining social disparities in the spatial distribution of environmental risks (e.g., whether hazardous facilities are disproportionately located in marginalized neighborhoods) is the subject of environmental justice scholarship and reflects the concept of distributive justice. In the case of UOG, the empirical evidence to date has shown some mixed indications of disproportionate placement of risks-including drilling, siting of pipelines and wastewater disposal facilities, toxic emissions, water quality complaints, and negative health outcomes-on marginalized communities Clough, 2018;Emanuel et al., 2021;Johnston et al., 2020;Kroepsch et al., 2019;Ogneva-Himmelberger & Huang, 2015;Silva et al., 2018;Zwickl, 2019). Studies vary with respect to the type and description of environmental hazards, the considered measures of social disadvantage, and the statistical approaches implemented. ...
... Previous research on distributive justice have used measures of proximity to UOG, including distance to nearest UOG well, number of UOG wells within predefined radial distances, and inverse distance weighted UOG well counts, as the primary proxy for risk Kroepsch et al., 2019). These proximity-based approaches capture aggregate risk but cannot identify specific risk mechanisms, for example, differentiating risks from air pollution versus drinking water pollution (Adgate et al., 2014;Deziel, Clark, et al., 2022). ...
Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development, made possible by horizontal drilling and high-volume hydraulic fracturing, has been fraught with controversy since the industry's rapid expansion in the early 2000's. Concerns about environmental contamination and public health risks persist in many rural communities that depend on groundwater resources for drinking and other daily needs. Spatial disparities in UOG risks can pose distributive environmental injustice if such risks are disproportionately borne by marginalized communities. In this paper, we analyzed groundwater vulnerability to contamination from UOG as a physically based measure of risk in conjunction with census tract level sociodemographic characteristics describing social vulnerability in the northern Appalachian Basin. We found significant associations between elevated groundwater vulnerability and lower population density, consistent with UOG development occurring in less densely populated rural areas. We also found associations between elevated groundwater vulnerability and lower income, higher proportions of elderly populations, and higher proportion of mobile homes, suggesting a disproportionate risk burden on these socially vulnerable groups. We did not find a statistically significant association between elevated groundwater vulnerability and populations of racial/ethnic minorities in our study region. Household surveys provided empirical support for a relationship between sociodemographic characteristics and capacity to assess and mitigate exposures to potentially contaminated water. Further research is needed to probe if the observed disparities translate to differences in chemical exposure and adverse health outcomes.
... Potential local and societal benefits also with relevance to health include increases in employment (e.g., oil and gas industry, food service industry, truck driving), increases in wages, increases in income for residents leasing their land or mineral rights, increases in revenues for local governments, and reductions in emissions of toxic chemicals and greenhouse gases from the replacement of coal with natural gas as an energy source (Marchand and Weber 2018;Sovacool 2014). However, there is ongoing debate about the magnitude, scale, and duration of these societal benefits and evidence that they are not distributed or perceived equally (Clarke et al. 2016;Kroepsch et al. 2019;Krupnick and Echarte 2017;Ravikumar and Brandt 2017). ...
... In addition to replication being a critical component of causal inference in epidemiology, policy makers rely on results from their own state or municipality to inform local policies. Additionally, we need more studies of the potential disproportionate environmental health impacts on different populations with regard to race, ethnicity, socioeconomic vulnerability, and urbanity/rurality, because certain subgroups may experience more pronounced responses due to greater cumulative burdens of multiple socioenvironmental stressors (Kroepsch et al. 2019;Payne-Sturges et al. 2021). The need for additional environmental justice-focused analyses is supported by findings from Willis et al. and by a study of birth outcomes and flaring from oil and gas wells in the Eagle Ford Shale of Texas that reported that adverse effects appeared to be disproportionately borne by Hispanic women (Cushing et al. 2020). ...
... Using environmental justice as analytical lens, this article aims to understand how local communities mobilise against fracking through 'formal, informal mainstream and subaltern channels' (Nygrem, Kröger and Gills 745, 2022) and use environmental justice as an organising theme to both express and polititise their multi-scalar struggles and claims centred on official recognition and social and environmental recovery and grounded in the defence of place. Environment justice literature and fracking intersect in several keyways, and the relevant literature has grown substantially in recent years as the practice has moved forward in both the global north and south (Clough 2018;Johnston et al. 2020;Kroepsch et al. 2019;Sovacool et al. 2020;Short and Szolucha 2019;Ryder and Malin 2021). Crucially, the framework emphasises how forms of discrimination are responsible for the disproportionate concentration of environmental hazards in low-income communities, communities of colour, and indigenous communities (Whyte 2019) and how communities have organised to oppose such conditions (Stretetsky et al 2022). ...
Having lost its energy self-sufficiency due to the exhaustion of conventional fossil fuels and rising domestic consumption, the Argentine government has increasingly looked to shale gas to transform its energy mix and resolve an ‘energy crisis’. Historicising justice claims by examining the social, political, and economic relations that generates and sustains fracking, this article highlights how Argentina’s energy transformation is reproducing multiple systemic injustices, in particular the historical configuration of state society relations around natural resources and the struggle for (environmental) democracy and social equity, as well as supporting patterns of political and economic power and racial ideologies. Despite these challenges, the antifracking movement has formulated collaborative processes and mechanisms of engagement driven by the core principles of environmental justice and are challenging fracking through a variety legal-judicial and political strategies. However, as the cases of Mendoza and Neuquén demonstrate, confronting and dislodging the state-oriented power relations that are embedded in extractivism remains extremely challenging.
... In general, this means an EJ study will consider the intersection of social disadvantage with environmental factors for the ultimate goal of achieving health equity. Studies may focus on exposure and sociodemographics alone (i.e., exposure science) or include both exposure and health outcomes (i.e., epidemiologic research) [2,[20][21][22][23]. Studies have evaluated different types of environmental justice including distributive environmental injustice or the disproportionate exposure among certain disadvantaged groups. ...
Purpose of Review
The volume of public health environmental justice (EJ) research produced by academic institutions increased through 2022. However, the methods used for evaluating EJ in exposure science and epidemiologic studies have not been catalogued. Here, we completed a scoping review of EJ studies published in 19 environmental science and epidemiologic journals from 2018 to 2021 to summarize research types, frameworks, and methods.
Recent Findings
We identified 402 articles that included populations with health disparities as a part of EJ research question and met other inclusion criteria. Most studies (60%) evaluated EJ questions related to socioeconomic status (SES) or race/ethnicity. EJ studies took place in 69 countries, led by the US (n = 246 [61%]). Only 50% of studies explicitly described a theoretical EJ framework in the background, methods, or discussion and just 10% explicitly stated a framework in all three sections. Among exposure studies, the most common area-level exposure was air pollution (40%), whereas chemicals predominated personal exposure studies (35%). Overall, the most common method used for exposure-only EJ analyses was main effect regression modeling (50%); for epidemiologic studies the most common method was effect modification (58%), where an analysis evaluated a health disparity variable as an effect modifier.
Summary
Based on the results of this scoping review, current methods in public health EJ studies could be bolstered by integrating expertise from other fields (e.g., sociology), conducting community-based participatory research and intervention studies, and using more rigorous, theory-based, and solution-oriented statistical research methods.
... Oil and gas extraction takes place in areas with specific geologic characteristics although economic, political, and social factors can play key roles in shaping where and how extraction occurs. Studies of the distributive environmental justice of fracking show that impacted populations vary by geography [95,128,129]. ...
Fossil fuels — coal, oil, and gas — lie at the heart of the interconnected crises we face, including climate change, racial injustice, and public health. Each stage of the fossil fuel life cycle — extraction, processing, transport, and combustion — generates toxic air and water pollution, as well as greenhouse gas (GHGs) emissions that drive the global climate crisis. Addressing the harmful effects of energy decisions, including unequal risk distribution across various governance levels, supply chains, and political jurisdictions, is a complex task for policymakers and society. A deeper understanding of how harms are embodied within fossil fuel life cycles is needed. This paper provides a narrative review of recent studies within the United States (U.S.) that document both public health harms and disproportionate impacts along the fossil fuel life cycle. In the U.S. the public health hazards from air and water pollution, and risks associated with climate change, fall disproportionately on Black, Brown, Indigenous, and poor communities. “Sacrifice zones” and systemic racism are deeply intertwined within the fossil-fuel based economy. We argue systemic racism subsidizes the fossil fuel industry by enabling it to externalize the costs of pollution and environmental degradation onto communities of color. We position “fossil fuel racism” as a subset of environmental racism and argue that this framing is useful because it shifts analytical and political focus to the systems and structures which are actively protecting and promoting continued production of fossil fuels. We discuss the implications of this body of research for climate policy, and outline how poorly designed “carbon-centric” policies—which focus narrowly on GHGs reduction—could fail to alleviate the racialized disparities or potentially worsen it for some communities. We emphasize the need to move beyond carbon-centric approaches to climate solutions to more integrative approaches to policy design that can improve public health, tackle the global climate crisis, and rectify our legacy of fossil fuel racism. Specifically we call for a managed phase out of fossil fuel production and the enactment of wider programs of social, economic, and democratic reforms via a Green New Deal. Adequately addressing the climate crisis and fossil fuel racism require political and policy solutions that disrupt the power and actions of the fossil fuel industry and their state allies.
... Methane emissions from O&G are a major climate policy concern [1,24], and many policies that affect the emissions of methane from O&G production may also affect emissions of air pollutants and consequent health impacts [22,25]. Therefore, understanding the health impacts of air pollution from O&G production is important from a climate 'co-benefits' perspective, a public health perspective, and an environmental justice perspective [26][27][28][29][30]. Observational studies indicate that populations living in proximity to or downwind of oil and gas activity have higher rates of poor birth outcomes [31], asthma exacerbations [32], emergency room visits [33], hospitalizations [34], cardiovascular disease [35] and other adverse health outcomes [36]. ...
Oil and gas production is one of the largest emitters of methane, a potent greenhouse gas and a significant contributor of air pollution emissions. While research on methane emissions from oil and gas production has grown rapidly, there is comparatively limited information on the distribution of impacts of this sector on air quality and associated health impacts. Understanding the contribution of air quality and health impacts of oil and gas can be useful for designing mitigation strategies. Here we assess air quality and human health impacts associated with ozone, fine particulate matter, and nitrogen dioxide from the oil and gas sector in the US in 2016, and compare this impact with that of the associated methane emissions. We find that air pollution in 2016 from the oil and gas sector in the US resulted in 410 000 asthma exacerbations, 2200 new cases of childhood asthma and 7500 excess deaths, with $77 billion in total health impacts. NO 2 was the highest contributor to health impacts (37%) followed by ozone (35%), and then PM 2.5 (28%). When monetized, these air quality health impacts of oil and gas production exceeded estimated climate impact costs from methane leakage by a factor of 3. These impacts add to the total life cycle impacts of oil and gas, and represent potential additional health benefits of strategies that reduce consumption of oil and gas. Policies to reduce oil and gas production emissions will lead to additional and significant health benefits from co-pollutant reductions that are not currently quantified or monetized.
... Air pollutants resulting from industrial and commercial activities may adversely affect nearby communities which do not proportionately benefit from economic outputs associated with the activities, thus creating environmental justice concerns (Kroepsch et al., 2019). In urban areas with high levels of air pollution, it can be challenging for a community to determine the impact from nearby emitters versus urban background on local air quality. ...
... Those most exposed to the impacts of gas extraction accrue few economic benefits and have little input on siting decisions in their communities or on amelioration of potential gas-related exposures. 89 Given its disproportionate burden on socially disadvantaged populations, phasing out natural gas would reduce "fossil fuel racism" 90 and possibly environmental health disparities. ...
Energy policy decisions are driven primarily by economic and reliability considerations, with limited consideration given to public health, environmental justice, and climate change. Moreover, epidemiologic studies relevant for public policy typically focus on immediate public health implications of activities related to energy procurement and generation, considering less so health equity or the longer-term health consequences of climate change attributable to an energy source. A more integrated, collective consideration of these three domains can provide more robust guidance to policymakers, communities, and individuals. Here, we illustrate how these domains can be evaluated with respect to natural gas as an energy source. Our process began with a detailed overview of all relevant steps in the process of extracting, producing, and consuming natural gas. We synthesized existing epidemiologic and complementary evidence of how these processes impact public health, environmental justice, and climate change. We conclude that, in certain domains, natural gas looks beneficial (e.g., economically for some), but when considered more expansively, through the life cycle of natural gas and joint lenses of public health, environmental justice, and climate change, natural gas is rendered an undesirable energy source in the United States. A holistic climate health equity framework can inform how we value and deploy different energy sources in the service of public health.
... The type of information needed for linking energy use metrics with social impact assessment is different for that needed for environmental impact assessment. For example, fuel type is highly relevant for predicting air emissions, but specific community (Boudet, 2019;Kroepsch et al., 2019) and even country (Ekener-Petersen et al., 2014) are likely far more relevant for understanding social context. Expanding the energy footprint to cover a wider range of resources could also enable clearer articulation of when, and how, social impacts of energy use matter. ...
As the energy system changes, metrics used to describe energy use for modelling, socioenvironmental assessment, and other applications should be continually evaluated to ensure ongoing relevance and applicability. Decarbonization highlights the need for fit-for-purpose assessment tools as energy systems undergo an expected transition from mostly fossil to mostly nonfossil resources. Energy use has historically been a high-quality proxy for socioenvironmental impacts of interest, but this characteristic depends on the relatively stable historical relationship between energy use (typically measured as exchanges of marketed energy resources and carriers like natural gas and electricity) and these impacts—a relationship that is increasingly weak. Already, energy use metrics used in tools like energy footprinting and life cycle assessment have developed maladaptations to include nonfossil resources, including many flow resources. For example, nonmarketed energy use is typically ignored; metrics like heat rate are applied to nonthermal resources in ways with limited physical meaning; and definitional exceptions are made without clear justification. Part of the challenge is that energy is a conserved quantity with highly variable quality, but energy footprint metrics have historically implicitly assumed that all energy, and energy use, is the same. The assessment community can improve the clarity and value of energy use quantification under decarbonization by drawing on the experience of footprinting with another highly heterogeneous conserved resource: water. This discussion introduces the concept of a yellow, red, and brown energy footprint framework as an expansion of traditional energy footprinting and analogue of the green, blue, and grey water footprinting framework.
... The poor UOG extraction knowledge base of many countries must be addressed by developing an evidence base. This will allow for the robust regulation of UOG extraction, which is a concern in countries that extract large volumes of UOG, including the US [35][36][37], the UK [38,39], Europe [39,40] and Australia [41]. This highlights the vital importance and crucial need for baseline studies on groundwater to be performed before the extraction of UOG. ...
Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) is an important energy source for many countries, but requires large quantities of water for its development, and may pollute water resources. Regulations are one of the main tools to achieve government policy on natural resource protection. South Africa, which is energy-constrained, but also water-scarce, is currently considering UOG extraction as an additional energy resource. UOG development could commence as soon as regulations to protect natural resources such as water have been published. Such regulations are, however, often not effectively enforced, which negatively affects the protection of water resources during UOG extraction. This study addresses these enforcement challenges in South Africa. It focuses on the science–society–policy interface by proposing a civic informatics platform to assist with on-the-ground enforcement of regulations via a mobile application. This mobile application aims to address both groundwater monitoring and management as well as UOG extraction operations in a single platform, to enable regulators to protect groundwater resources more effectively during UOG extraction, while simultaneously enhancing transparency in the UOG industry.
... This article addresses these research gaps. Kroepsch et al. (2019) identified a range of critical questions for developing a research agenda on environmental justice in this context, and this study informs one of them: who lives near wells? This is a first, but critical step, in better understanding distributional inequity in this context. ...
This study documents the prevalence of historically marginalized populations (across age, income, education, race-ethnicity, and language) living near active oil and gas wells throughout the USA, at both local and aggregated scales. This is performed by way of areal apportionment using well location data and population characteristics from the American Community Survey. A clustering analysis of marginalized populations living near a high density of wells reveals four distinct regions of high prevalence: southern California, southwest Texas, Appalachia, and northwest New Mexico. At the nationwide scale, we find large absolute numbers of people living near wells, including marginalized groups: nearly 18 million people in total across the USA, many of which are Hispanic (3.3 million), Black (1.8 million), Asian (0.7 million), and Native American (0.5 million), live below the poverty line (3 million), older individuals (3 million), or young children (over 1 million). In certain states, this represents a large share of the total population – over 50% in the case of West Virginia and Oklahoma. Estimates are subsequently compared to county-level control groups to assess patterns of disproportionality. Wide variations are found across regions and metrics, underscoring the locally specific nature of these data. Our research contributes to the field of environmental justice by describing the populations living near oil and gas wells.
... Besides, the indirect impacts associated with climate change and oil and gas infrastructure pose direct risks to nearby communities. At both upstream and downstream ends of the oil and gas supply chains, communities experience environmental degradation and incur a wide range of health and safety risks associated with phenomena, such as hydraulic fracturing, directional drilling, worker encampments (i.e., "man camps"), refining, electricity production, and more (Bullard, 2018;Colborn et al., 2014;Davies, 2019;Kroepsch et al., 2019;Olmstead et al., 2013;O'Rourke & Connolly, 2003;Rahm et al., 2015;Whyte, 2017). ...
Midstream oil and gas infrastructure comprises vast networks of gathering and transmission pipelines that connect upstream extraction to downstream consumption. In the United States (US), public policies and corporate decisions have prompted a wave of proposals for new gathering and transmission pipelines in recent years, raising the question: Who bears the burdens associated with the existing pipeline infrastructure in the US? With this in mind, we examined the density of natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines in the US, together with county‐level data on social vulnerability. For the 2,261 US counties containing natural gas pipelines, we found a positive correlation between county‐level pipeline density and an index of social vulnerability. In general, counties with more socially vulnerable populations have significantly higher pipeline densities than counties with less socially vulnerable populations. In particular, counties in the top quartile of social vulnerability tend to have pipeline densities that are much higher than pipeline densities for counties in the bottom quartile of social vulnerability. The difference grows larger for counties at the upper extremes of pipeline density within each group. We discuss some of the implications for the indigenous communities and others affected by recent expansions of oil and gas infrastructure. We offer recommendations aimed at improving ways in which decision‐makers identify and address the societal impacts and environmental justice implications of midstream pipeline infrastructure.
... Environmental health burdens associated with UOGD specifically have been shown to be differentially distributed based on socio-economic or demographic factors [36][37][38]. Ogneva-Himmelberger and colleagues [39] identified an association between the placement of UOGD wells and PA populations living in poverty, though they did not observe this relationship in Ohio or West Virginia. UOGD waste disposal wells in Texas were disproportionately located in communities of color [40] and in Ohio in areas of lower income [41]. ...
Oil and gas development has led to environmental hazards and community concerns, particularly in relation to water supply issues. Filing complaints with state agencies enables citizens to register concerns and seek investigations. We evaluated associations between county-level socio-economic and demographic factors, oil and gas drilling, and three outcomes in Pennsylvania between 2004 and 2016: number of oil and gas complaints filed, and both the number and proportion of state investigations of water supply complaints yielding a confirmed water supply impairment (i.e., “positive determination”). We used hierarchical Bayesian Poisson and binomial regression analyses. From 2004 to 2016, 9,404 oil and gas-related complaints were filed, of which 4,099 were water supply complaints. Of those, 3,906 received investigations, and 215 yielded positive determinations. We observed a 47% increase in complaints filed per $10,000 increase in annual median household income (MHI) (Rate Ratio [RR]: 1.47, 95% credible interval [CI]: 1.09–1.96) and an 18% increase per 1% increase in educational attainment (RR: 1.18, 95% CI: 1.11–1.26). While the number of complaints filed did not vary by race/ethnicity, the odds of a complaint yielding a positive determination were 0.81 times lower in counties with a higher proportion of marginalized populations (Odds Ratio [OR]: 0.81 per 1% increase in percent Black, Asian, and Native American populations combined, 95% CI: 0.64–0.99). The odds of positive determinations were also lower in areas with higher income (OR per $10,000 increase in MHI: 0.35, 95% CI: 0.09–0.96). Our results suggest these relationships are complex and may indicate potential environmental and procedural inequities, warranting further investigation.
Continuing to emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) moves our planet closer to crossing critical tipping points, making ongoing development of fossil fuels an act of climate injustice. Yet, the United States has doubled down on unconventional oil and gas (UOG), becoming the top global producer of hydrocarbons. Significant segments of the public resist UOG drilling, mobilizing to limit or stop production due to intersecting climate, environmental, and public health concerns. However, regulatory conflicts complicate the power of public resistance and problematize the role of the state in facilitating industry. UOG production has rapidly expanded with little capacity for public participation in decision-making. We contend this is a climate injustice—where procedural injustices across levels of governance make it difficult for the public to prevent fossil fuel extraction. We examine these injustices across state legislative, judicial, and executive governance processes in Colorado where residents have actively resisted UOG production. We demonstrate how the public consistently faces procedural inequities and power disadvantages across multiple sites and levels of decision-making, resulting in multilevel disempowerment. In this high-stakes context, our policy ethnography illustrates how these multilevel procedural injustices can facilitate rapid expansion of UOG production, where state-sanctioned activities also constitute broader acts of climate violence and injustice.
The elimination of health disparities is the goal of health justice which is especially important for those who live in rural areas. The ensuring of fair access to medical services in rural areas requires providing healthcare for the populace living in these places. The rural areas frequently experience particular issues such as a lack of healthcare experts a restricted healthcare infrastructure and trouble receiving specialist care. Upholding human rights is a business entity's role and a crucial part of their corporate social responsibility. Corporate social responsibility, business and human rights concerns have different legal aspects and contents. The methodical approach to putting these ideas into practice is still the same. The chapter looks at how society views the link between these two domains and whether or not voluntary corporate social responsibility programs include human rights. In order to improve healthcare infrastructure, it focuses on creating and bolstering district hospitals, community health clinics and primary health centres.
Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) is an emerging activity with extremely limited deployment to date, but which is mathematically required to achieve net (rather than true) zero or negative anthropogenic contribution to climate change. The required scale of CDR, however, depends on decisions about what activities will be allowed to emit greenhouse gases – the “residual emissions” that must be compensated via CDR. Simultaneously, CDR’s availability is limited by resource needs and feasibility, much like conventional depletable resources. Governance and institutions, especially related to how CDR is allocated and paid for, will fundamentally shape CDR efforts, including by structurally incentivizing particular approaches and monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) objectives. We argue that the emerging tendency toward market-based, unconstrained, and for-profit CDR presents fundamental and predictable risks for climate and justice goals. Such a model incentivizes growth in profitable compensatory removal applications, effectively allocating limited resources based on ability to pay rather than public good, while also increasing the amount of CDR required to meet global climate targets. “Luxury” removals that could otherwise be mitigated not only displace, but actively disincentivize deployment for compensatory removals in high priority but low wealth applications, and for drawdown. Meeting these needs would likely become a socialized cost. Markets also establish unit-level property rights that require specific kinds of MRV that are misaligned with climate outcomes and face incentives for poor quality verification. We describe the need, development context, function, and resource limitations of CDR, then characterize the major challenges with the emerging unconstrained, for-profit governance model. We argue that instead implementing CDR as a centrally planned sector, with publicly deliberated and adaptable volumetric targets integrated with other climate action, could enable more just and effective outcomes.
Small industrial sources collectively release large amounts of pollution, including particulate matter (PM) that contributes to air quality problems in the United States and elsewhere. We study one such type of industrial facility, concrete batch plants, and analyze PM emissions and siting patterns of 131 plants located in Harris County, Texas. We find that concrete batch plants in Harris County are collectively a major pollution source, contributing between 38 and 111 tons of primary PM2.5 emissions (between 26%-76% of PM2.5 from the median Texas oil refinery) and between 109 and 493 tons of primary PM10 emissions (between 64%-290% of PM10 from the median refinery). Estimates from an integrated assessment model suggest that health damages from the PM2.5 emissions alone amount to $29 million annually, reflecting two additional premature deaths per year. We further find that concrete batch plants in Harris County are disproportionately located in census tracts with more low-income, Hispanic, and Black populations, thereby raising important environmental justice questions. On the basis of these findings, we argue that small pollution sources require more air quality monitoring and emissions reporting and that regulatory agencies should consider cumulative environmental and health impacts of these sources as part of the permitting process.
Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production has reinvigorated US production while creating conflicts over governance and environmental injustices. Here, we focus on relationships among power, regulatory conflict, and procedural justice around UOG by examining the Colorado Oil and Gas Task Force (TF) and its decision‐making processes. Instead of statewide voting on UOG ballot measures, Colorado convened a 21‐member TF tasked with making regulatory recommendations. We draw on interviews, participant observation, and policy ethnography to examine: who sets the rules of the game, how players are chosen, and by whom. We ask the following questions: (1) How did TF members and other political actors exert state and institutional power, and how did that shape the structure, composition, processes, and outcomes of the TF?; (2) As a state‐created body, how did the TF and its internal processes disrupt or reinforce power relations favoring industry and fossil fuel development?; and (3) What were the procedural justice implications of TF processes? We advance scholarship on procedural justice by demonstrating how people operate at institutional scales to shape decision‐making structures, processes, and outcomes. We show how nonelected bodies can work as state interventions for industry, reinforcing industry power and procedural injustices rather than disrupting them .
This chapter demonstrates how to integrate geographic information systems (GIS) data into environmental justice (EJ) research in Latin America’s oil and natural gas extraction regions. It discusses two forms of distributional justice analysis: traditional and benefit sharing. Two recent GIS-based EJ studies conducted in a major oil and gas production area in Mexico demonstrate the challenges, workarounds, and types of geospatial data that can be used to conduct distributional environmental justice studies. We also evaluate the availability of open-access oil and natural gas, and demographic data among six hydrocarbon-producing countries in the region and provide guidelines and suggestions for conducting GIS-based EJ studies in Latin America. Finally, this chapter contends that integrating geospatial and empirical EJ analysis with qualitative EJ approaches not only strengthens EJ analysis in oil and natural gas production zones in Latin America, but also can be used to legitimize political claims and increase community engagement, as well as facilitate interdisciplinary dialog.KeywordsEnvironmental justiceExtractionNatural gasOil
Background
Community socioeconomic deprivation (CSD) may be related to higher oil and natural gas development (OGD) exposure. We tested for distributive and benefit-sharing environmental injustice in Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale by examining (1) whether OGD and waste disposal occurred disproportionately in more deprived communities and (2) discordance between the location of land leased for OGD and where oil and gas rights owners resided.
Materials and Methods
Analyses took place at the county subdivision level and considered OGD wells, waste disposal, and land lease agreement locations from 2005 to 2019. Using 2005–2009 American Community Survey data, we created a CSD index relevant to community vulnerability in suburban/rural areas.
Results
In adjusted regression models accounting for spatial dependence, we observed no association between the CSD index and conventional or unconventional drilled well presence. However, a higher CSD index was linearly associated with odds of a subdivision having an OGD waste disposal site and receiving a larger volume of waste. A higher percentage of oil and gas rights owners lived in the same county subdivision as leased land when the community was least versus most deprived (66% vs. 56% in same county subdivision), suggesting that individuals in more deprived communities were less likely to financially benefit from OGD exposure.
Discussion and Conclusions
We observed distributive environmental injustice with respect to well waste disposal and benefit-sharing environmental injustice related to oil and rights owner's residential locations across Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale. These results add evidence of a disparity between exposure and benefits resulting from OGD.
Environmental justice (EJ) concerns about shale gas have recently emerged. Relatively little is known about the lived experiences and on-the-ground EJ concerns of UK communities facing drilling proposals. We address this knowledge gap through a UK case study of Woodsetts, South Yorkshire, where a prolonged planning process has created anticipatory EJ issues that demonstrate how injustices occur prior to development, creating damaging effects on a community across several years. We find evidence of both well-established and newly emerging distributive, procedural and recognition justice issues, including concerns about the disparate distribution of risks for the most intersectionally-vulnerable residents, a lack of timely access to data and information, and a lack of understanding and recognition of local residents and their place-based concerns. These findings have conceptual implications for future research on perceptions, anticipations and experiences of EJ, as well as practical implications for future energy proposals aimed at meeting net zero emissions.
The development of unconventional oil and gas shales using hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling is currently a focal point of energy and climate change discussions. While this technology has provided access to substantial reserves of oil and gas, the need for large quantities of water, emissions, and infrastructure raises concerns over the environmental impacts. Written by an international consortium of experts, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the extraction from unconventional reservoirs, providing clear explanations of the technology and processes involved. Each chapter is devoted to different aspects including global reserves, the status of their development and regulatory framework, water management and contamination, air quality, earthquakes, radioactivity, isotope geochemistry, microbiology, and climate change. Case studies present baseline studies, water monitoring efforts and habitat destruction. This book is accessible to a wide audience, from academics to industry professionals and policy makers interested in environmental pollution and petroleum exploration.
In the last decade, unconventional oil and gas (UOG) has changed the world’s energy landscapes, often outpacing governments’ efforts to regulate it. Yet, few studies focus on the processes of governance, particularly on questions of procedural equity. Here we examine the process of the 2014 Colorado Oil and Gas Task Force (TF), which was established to address regulatory conflicts over drilling, particularly along the Northern Colorado Front Range. The TF aimed to create a level playing field for influencing decision-making. However, we find that several power mechanisms were deployed by the state and the industry, ensuring that those with the least opportunity to meaningfully influence outcomes were also most likely to be impacted by the TF’s regulatory recommendations had the least opportunity to meaningfully influence the process and its outcomes. Thus we advance existing literature on procedural injustice by focusing on the underlying power mechanisms that help structure procedural injustice in these processes.
The development of unconventional oil and gas shales using hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling is currently a focal point of energy and climate change discussions. While this technology has provided access to substantial reserves of oil and gas, the need for large quantities of water, emissions, and infrastructure raises concerns over the environmental impacts. Written by an international consortium of experts, this book provides a comprehensive overview of the extraction from unconventional reservoirs, providing clear explanations of the technology and processes involved. Each chapter is devoted to different aspects including global reserves, the status of their development and regulatory framework, water management and contamination, air quality, earthquakes, radioactivity, isotope geochemistry, microbiology, and climate change. Case studies present baseline studies, water monitoring efforts and habitat destruction. This book is accessible to a wide audience, from academics to industry professionals and policy makers interested in environmental pollution and petroleum exploration.
Concerns over unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development persist, especially in rural communities that rely on shallow groundwater for drinking and other domestic purposes. Given the continued expansion of the industry, regional (vs local scale) models are needed to characterize groundwater contamination risks faced by the increasing proportion of the population residing in areas that accommodate UOG extraction. In this paper, we evaluate groundwater vulnerability to contamination from surface spills and shallow subsurface leakage of UOG wells within a 104,000 km2 region in the Appalachian Basin, northeastern USA. We test a computationally efficient ensemble approach for simulating groundwater flow and contaminant transport processes to quantify vulnerability with high resolution. We also examine metamodels, or machine learning models trained to emulate physically based models, and investigate their spatial transferability. We identify predictors describing proximity to UOG, hydrology, and topography that are important for metamodels to make accurate vulnerability predictions outside their training regions. Using our approach, we estimate that 21,000-30,000 individuals in our study area are dependent on domestic water wells that are vulnerable to contamination from UOG activities. Our novel modeling framework could be used to guide groundwater monitoring, provide information for public health studies, and assess environmental justice issues.
Insufficient salt resistance is one of the main problems of current weak gel water-based drilling fluid systems. The key to overcoming this problem lies in the development of a core treatment agent with high salt resistance—gelling agent. This study employs free-radical polymerization to synthesize a weak gel water-based drilling fluid gel former (WGA) using the monomers acrylamide (AM), 2-acrylamide-2-methylacrylamide (AMPS), and 2-acrylamidoalkylsulfonic acid. Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy, thermogravimetric analysis, the one-point method, shale rolling recovery rate and linear expansion studies, and environmental scanning electron microscopy are used to characterize the WGA and evaluate its performance. The molecular weight of WGA is 3.51 × 106, the structure meets the design requirements, and the viscosity-increasing effect is remarkable: The apparent viscosity of 5% WGA aqueous solution is 110 000 mPa·s (0.3 rpm), the shear rate increases, and the viscosity decreases rapidly, showing a unique rheological properties. Enhanced salt tolerance: When NaCl is saturated, the apparent viscosity (0.3 rpm) of 2% WGA solution can still reach 10 412 mPa·s. Compared with the solution without NaCl, the rolling recovery of shale is reduced by 15.6%, and the linear expansion rate is increased by 4.5%. The aqueous solution of WGA has a 3D network structure, and its concentration increases, the hydrophobic force between molecular chains increases, and the network structure becomes denser, which makes it able to strongly inhibit the dispersion and swelling of clay minerals. This research lays the foundation for the development of a weak gel water-based drilling fluid system with strong salt resistance.
In the United States, unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production has elicited strong public response. As production occurs amid residential and commercial spaces, environmental, social, economic, regulatory, and mental health impacts have been documented across locations. Some community groups have mobilized against this activity, whereas others have not. We examine how and why UOG production becomes normalized despite its disruptions and risks. Through years of fieldwork, we have observed limited organized mobilization. Even activists express hesitation to demand transformative changes or complete stoppage of UOG production. Yet the drivers of these dynamics need to be better understood. We argue that these passive “sites of acceptance” emerge through a two‐part influence of neoliberalism. First, a mosaic of ideas and policy measures privileging deregulation and free markets manifests itself in a unique discourse we call collective neoliberalism. Second, neoliberalism as a system of governance creates a fractured, devolved regulatory environment ripe for regulatory capture and lacking sufficient resources. This, in turn, can discourage local efforts to limit or regulate UOG production as regulators seem unresponsive, poorly resourced, or tacitly more supportive of industry than the public. We use ethnographic data collected amid dense, widespread UOG production in Colorado to illustrate these patterns.
Given the serious adverse health effects associated with many pollutants, and the inequitable distribution of these effects between socioeconomic groups, air pollution is often a focus of environmental justice (EJ) research. However, EJ analyses that aim to illuminate whether and how air pollution hazards are inequitably distributed may present a unique set of requirements for estimating pollutant concentrations compared to other air quality applications. Here, we perform a scoping review of the range of data analytic and modeling methods applied in past studies of air pollution and environmental injustice and develop a guidance framework for selecting between them given the purpose of analysis, users, and resources available. We include proxy, monitor-based, statistical, and process-based methods. Upon critically synthesizing the literature, we identify four main dimensions to inform method selection: accuracy, interpretability, spatiotemporal features of the method, and usability of the method. We illustrate the guidance framework with case studies from the literature. Future research in this area includes an exploration of increasing data availability, advanced statistical methods, and the importance of science-based policy.
Trump’s America First Energy Plan, which focuses on oil and gas expansion and rolling back regulations, promised to insulate the US economy from the volatile global oil market. In reality, the US shale oil industry, operating within the global oil markets, suffered contractions when oil supplier nations’ price wars caused global oil prices to crash. While the plan promised to bring Americans jobs and prosperity, predicating economic development on oil and gas extraction is a dubious strategy for several reasons. The shale industry, which contributed to the recent boom and expected future production, suffers from a shaky financial foundation. Even prior to COVID-19, traditional investors had begun cutting lending to shale companies and bankruptcies were accelerating. In March 2020, under Congress’s COVID-19 financial rescue package, the Trump administration executed a bailout for the oil and gas industry that shifted financial losses to American taxpayers without securing companies’ agreements to keep workers employed. The bailout replicates the decades-long economic model of the industry, which privatizes profits to the companies, while socializing the costs from the industry, through tax preferences and subsidies for the industry and through various laws that favor extraction over those that suffer from the industry’s adverse impacts.
Unconventional oil and gas (UOG) production requires a vast quantity of freshwater while generating substantial volumes of wastewater. Although numerous studies have focused on technology development, other aspects beyond treatment technology, including regulations, economics, system logistics, and public perception, play equally or more important roles collectively in the selection and deployment of UOG wastewater management practices. In this article, we begin with a critical analysis of the motivations that drive UOG wastewater management towards treatment and reuse. Then we examine four main barriers against such a paradigm shift, pertaining to treatment technology, regulatory compliance, economic feasibility, and social acceptance. Despite the need of further improving technology efficiency for UOG wastewater treatment, the lack of established regulatory framework, the uncertainties of economic viability, as well as public resistance, hinder practical implementation of treatment technologies. We highlight the importance of knowledge and collaborative efforts from engineers, regulators, policy makers, economists, and social scientists to address those barriers, and emphasize that future research efforts should be directed at domains well beyond treatment technology. A systems approach and broader collaboration across multiple disciplines is needed to translate technology innovation into solutions that truly improve water sustainability in the context of rising UOG production.
Methane superemitters emit non-methane copollutants that are harmful to human health. Yet, no prior studies have assessed disparities in exposure to methane superemitters with respect to race/ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and civic engagement. To do so, we obtained the location, category (e.g., landfill, refinery), and emission rate of California methane superemitters from Next Generation Airborne Visible/Infrared Imaging Spectrometer (AVIRIS-NG) flights conducted between 2016 and 2018. We identified block groups within 2 km of superemitters (exposed) and 5–10 km away (unexposed) using dasymetric mapping and assigned level of exposure among block groups within 2 km (measured via number of superemitter categories and total methane emissions). Analyses included 483 superemitters. The majority were dairy/manure (n = 213) and oil/gas production sites (n = 127). Results from fully adjusted logistic mixed models indicate environmental injustice in methane superemitter locations. For example, for every 10% increase in non-Hispanic Black residents, the odds of exposure increased by 10% (95% confidence interval (CI): 1.04, 1.17). We observed similar disparities for Hispanics and Native Americans but not with indicators of socioeconomic status. Among block groups located within 2 km, increasing proportions of non-White populations and lower voter turnout were associated with higher superemitter emission intensity. Previously unrecognized racial/ethnic disparities in exposure to California methane superemitters should be considered in policies to tackle methane emissions.
In 2012 Pennsylvania's legislature increased the unconventional natural gas (UNG) well-to-building setback requirement from 200 ft to 500 ft through Act 13. To evaluate this policy, we identified all setback incident locations where a UNG well was within 500 ft of a building both before and after the implementation of Act 13. Using an interrupted time series design, we found that Act 13 did not significantly alter how wells were sited in relation to nearby buildings. Of the 1042 wells that contained a building within 500 ft – equating to ~10.1% of UNG wells (n = 11,148) and ~14.7% well pads (n = 479) – a total of 371 well setback incidents occurred after Act 13, likely due from the existing well pad exemption (35%) and a combination of landowner consent and regulatory variances rather than encroaching building construction. Overall, our study suggests that exemptions are an important and underappreciated aspect of oil and gas well setback rulemaking and highlights the relevance of other health-protective regulatory tools often promulgated alongside setbacks. New or amended setback regulations should revisit exemption procedures and where warranted, impose additional mitigation measures to ensure setback regulations provide adequate protections for health and safety as intended.
Mannanase acts as an environmental-friendly breaker in the hydraulic fracturing to hydrolyze the galactomannan (GM) of fracturing fluids facilitating the fluids flow-back. In this work, an endo-β-mannanase (Man3-2) was separated from a newly-isolated GM-degrading bacterium, Bacillus aerius (Strain3-2). The GM molecular could be broken by the hydrolysis of Man3-2 into low-molecular oligosaccharide fragments primarily, leading to the rapid decrease of GM solution viscosity, where the enzymatic breaking efficiency was over 90% in 2.0 h. Also, in the core-scale simulation, the permeability recovery of Man3-2 was 73.93%–94.18%, much higher than that of oxidative breaker ((NH4)2S2O8) of 29.18%–32.21%. Man3-2 was a growth-associated extracellular inducible enzyme and it could be obtained by the culture of Strain3-2 at 50 °C and pH of 6–7 in the GM-organic nitrogen medium. Man3-2 retained high-efficient enzymatic degradation ability at the temperature range of 30°C-80 °C, pH range of 4.0–7.5 and high-concentration of brine (NaCl, CaCl2, BaCl2, artificial formation brine). The enzyme activity of Man3-2 is inert in the GM-borax gel-system due to the alkaline condition, but it can be reactivated as the pH turned to neutral. These findings suggested that Man3-2 is a new high-efficient low-temperature and pH-regulable gel-breaker for GM-based fracturing fluids, and shows potentiality to control the gel-breaking of fracturing fluids.
Over the past decade, sensor networks have been proven valuable to assess air quality on highly localized scales. Here we leverage innovative sensors to characterize gaseous pollutants in a complex urban environment and evaluate differences in air quality in three different Los Angeles neighborhoods where oil and gas activity is present. We deployed monitors across urban neighborhoods in South Los Angles adjacent to oil and gas facilities with varying levels of production. Using low-cost sensors built in-house, we measured methane, total non-methane hydrocarbons (TNMHCs), carbon monoxide, and carbon dioxide during three deployment campaigns over four years. The multi-sensor linear regression calibration model developed to quantify methane and TNMHCs offers up to 16% improvement in coefficient of determination and up to a 22% reduction in root mean square error for the most recent dataset as compared to previous models. The deployment results demonstrate that airborne methane concentrations are higher within a 500 m radius of three urban oil and gas facilities, as well as near a natural gas distribution pipeline, likely a result of proximity to sources. While there are numerous additional sources of TNMHCs in complex urban environments, some sites appear to be larger emitters than others. Significant methane emissions were also measured at an idle site, suggesting that fugitive emissions may still occur even if production is ceased. Episodic spikes of both compounds suggested an association with oil and gas activities, demonstrating how sensor networks can be used to elucidate community-scale sources and differences in air quality moving forward.
Keto acids are essential organic acids that are widely applied in pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, food, beverages, and feed additives as well as chemical synthesis. Currently, most keto acids on the market are prepared via chemical synthesis. The biochemical synthesis of keto acids has been discovered with the development of metabolic engineering and applied toward the production of specific keto acids from renewable carbohydrates using different metabolic engineering strategies in microbes. In this review, we provide a systematic summary of the types and applications of keto acids, and then summarize and compare the chemical and biochemical synthesis routes used for the production of typical keto acids, including pyruvic acid, oxaloacetic acid, α-oxobutanoic acid, acetoacetic acid, ketoglutaric acid, levulinic acid, 5-aminolevulinic acid, α-ketoisovaleric acid, α-keto-γ-methylthiobutyric acid, α-ketoisocaproic acid, 2-keto-L-gulonic acid, 2-keto-D-gluconic acid, 5-keto-D-gluconic acid, and phenylpyruvic acid. We also describe the current challenges for the industrial-scale production of keto acids and further strategies used to accelerate the green production of keto acids via biochemical routes.
Does land fragmentation impair spatially expansive natural resource use? We conduct empirical tests using ownership variation on the Bakken, one of the world's most valuable shale oil reserves. Long before shale was discovered, U.S. policies created a mosaic of private, jointly owned, and tribal government parcels on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation. We find that all three forms of fragmentation reduced production during the 2010–2015 oil boom, especially joint ownership and the interspersion of small parcels of government and private land. We estimate implied gains from consolidation and discuss implications for the use (or conservation) of other spatially expansive resources.
Emerging evidence indicates that proximity to unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is associated with health outcomes. There is intense debate about "How close is too close?" for maintaining public health and safety. The goal of this Delphi study was to elicit expert consensus on appropriate setback distances for UOGD from human activity. Three rounds were used to identify and seek consensus on recommended setback distances. The 18 panelists were health care providers, public health practitioners, environmental advocates, and researchers/scientists. Consensus was defined as agreement of ≥70% of panelists. Content analysis of responses to Round 1 questions revealed four categories: recommend setback distances; do not recommend setback distances; recommend additional setback distances for vulnerable populations; do not recommend additional setback distances for vulnerable populations. In Round 2, panelists indicated their level of agreement with the statements in each category using a five-point Likert scale. Based on emerging consensus, statements within each category were collapsed into seven statements for Round 3: recommend set back distances of
Environmental and community factors may influence the development or course of depression and sleep problems. We evaluated the association of unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) with depression symptoms and disordered sleep diagnoses using the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 and electronic health record data among Geisinger adult primary care patients in Pennsylvania. Participants received a retrospective metric for UNGD at their residence (very low, low, medium, and high) that incorporated dates and durations of well development, distance from patient homes to wells, and well characteristics. Analyses included 4,762 participants with no (62%), mild (23%), moderate (10%), and moderately severe or severe (5%) depression symptoms in 2014-2015 and 3,868 disordered sleep diagnoses between 2009-2015. We observed associations between living closer to more and bigger wells and depression symptoms, but not disordered sleep diagnoses in models weighted to account for sampling design and participation. High UNGD (vs. very low) was associated with depression symptoms in an adjusted negative binomial model (exponentiated coefficient = 1.18, 95% confidence interval [CI]: 1.04-1.34). High and low UNGD (vs. very low) were associated with depression symptoms (vs. none) in an adjusted multinomial logistic model. Our findings suggest that UNGD may be associated with adverse mental health in Pennsylvania.
Background:
Studies of unconventional gas development (UGD) and preterm birth (PTB) have not presented risk estimates by well development phase or trimester.
Objective:
We examined phase and trimester-specific associations between UGD activity and PTB.
Methods:
We conducted a case-control study of women with singleton births in the Barnett Shale area, Texas, from 30 November 2010 to 29 November 2012. We individually age- and race/ethnicity-matched five controls to each PTB case (n=13,328) and truncated controls' time at risk according to the matched case's gestational age. We created phase-specific UGD-activity metrics:a) inverse squared distance-weighted (IDW) count of wells in the drilling phase ≤0.5 mi (804.7 meters) of the residence andb) IDW sum of natural gas produced ≤0.5 mi of the residence. We also constructed trimester- and gestation-specific metrics. Metrics were categorized as follows: zero wells (reference), first, second, third tertiles of UGD activity. Analyses were repeated by PTB severity: extreme, very, and moderate (<28, 28 to<32, and 32 to<37 completed weeks). Data were analyzed using conditional logistic regression.
Results:
We found increased odds of PTB in the third tertile of the UGD drilling {odds ratio (OR)=1.20 [95% confidence interval (CI): 1.06, 1.37]} and UGD-production [OR=1.15 (1.05, 1.26)] metrics. Among women in the third tertile of UGD-production, associations were strongest in trimesters one [OR=1.18 (1.02, 1.37)] and two [OR=1.14 (0.99, 1.31). The greatest risk was observed for extremely PTB [third tertile ORs: UGD drilling, 2.00 (1.23, 3.24); UGD production, 1.53 (1.03-2.27)].
Conclusions:
We found evidence of differences in phase- and trimester-specific associations of UGD and PTB and indication of particular risk associated with extremely preterm birth. Future studies should focus on quantifying specific chemical and nonchemical stressors associated with UGD. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP2622.
Public concern about oil and gas (O&G) operations in residential areas is substantial. Noise from construction and drilling related to O&G operations may be greater than other phases of O&G operations, yet the impacts of audible and low frequency noise during these operations are not extensively explored nor the effects on health well understood. This study documents the noise levels at a multi-well O&G well pad during construction and drilling in a residential area in Colorado. A-weighted (dBA) and C-weighted (dBC) noise measurements were collected at four locations during development over a three-month period. The maximum one-minute equivalent continuous sound levels over a one-month period were 60.2 dBA and 80.0 dBC. Overall, 41.1% of daytime and 23.6% of nighttime dBA one-minute equivalent continuous noise measurements were found to exceed 50 dBA, and 97.5% of daytime and 98.3% of nighttime measurements were found to exceed 60 dBC. Noise levels exceeding 50 dBA or 60 dBC may cause annoyance and be detrimental to health, thus these noise levels have the potential to impact health and noise levels and associated health effects warrant further investigation.
In 1923, Southern California produced over twenty percent of the world’s oil. At the epicenter of an oil boom from 1892 to the 1930s, Los Angeles grew into the nation’s fifth largest city. By the end of the rush, it had also become one of the most racially segregated cities in the country. Historians have overlooked the relationship between industrialists drilling for oil and real estate developers codifying a racist housing market, namely through “redlining” maps and mortgage lending. While redlining is typically understood as a problem of horizontal territory, this paper argues that the mapping of the underground—the location and volume of subterranean oil fields, in particular—was a crucial technique in underwriting urban apartheid. Mapping technologies linked oil exploitation with restrictive property rights, constructing oil as a resource and vertically engineering a racialized housing market. By focusing on petro-industrialization interlocked with segregationist housing, this article reveals an unexamined chapter in Los Angeles’s history of resource exploitation and racial capitalism. Moreover, it contributes to a growing literature on the social production of resources, extractive technology and political exclusion, and the technoscientific practices used by states and corporations to mine the underground while constructing metropolitan inequality above ground.
The development of hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) is considered the biggest change to the global energy production system in the last half-century. However, several communities have banned fracking because of unresolved concerns about the impact of this process on human health. To evaluate the potential health impacts of fracking, we analyzed records of more than 1.1 million births in Pennsylvania from 2004 to 2013, comparing infants born to mothers living at different distances from active fracking sites and those born both before and after fracking was initiated at each site. We adjusted for fixed maternal determinants of infant health by comparing siblings who were and were not exposed to fracking sites in utero. We found evidence for negative health effects of in utero exposure to fracking sites within 3 km of a mother’s residence, with the largest health impacts seen for in utero exposure within 1 km of fracking sites. Negative health impacts include a greater incidence of low–birth weight babies as well as significant declines in average birth weight and in several other measures of infant health. There is little evidence for health effects at distances beyond 3 km, suggesting that health impacts of fracking are highly local. Informal estimates suggest that about 29,000 of the nearly 4 million annual U.S. births occur within 1 km of an active fracking site and that these births therefore may be at higher risk of poor birth outcomes.
High mixing ratios of ozone (O3) in the northern Front Range (NFR) of Colorado are not limited to the urban Denver area but were also observed in rural areas where oil and gas activity is the primary source of O3 precursors. On individual days, oil and gas O3 precursors can contribute in excess of 30 ppb to O3 growth and can lead to exceedances of the EPA O3 National Ambient Air Quality Standard. Data used in this study were gathered from continuous surface O3 monitors for June–August 2013–2015 as well as additional flask measurements and mobile laboratories that were part of the FRAPPE/DISCOVER-AQ field campaign of July–August 2014. Overall observed O3 levels during the summer of 2014 were lower than in 2013, likely due to cooler and damper weather than an average summer. This study determined the median hourly surface O3 mixing ratio in the NFR on summer days with limited photochemical production to be approximately 45–55 ppb. Mobile laboratory and flask data collected on three days provide representative case studies of different O3 formation environments in and around Greeley, Colorado. Observations of several gases (including methane, ethane, CO, nitrous oxide) along with O3 are used to identify sources of O3 precursor emissions. A July 23 survey demonstrated low O3 (45–60 ppb) while August 3 and August 13 surveys recorded O3 levels of 75–80 ppb or more. August 3 exemplifies influence of moderate urban and high oil and gas O3 precursor emissions. August 13 demonstrates high oil and gas emissions, low agricultural emissions, and CO measurements that were well correlated with ethane from oil and gas, suggesting an oil and gas related activity as a NOx and O3 precursor source. Low isoprene levels indicated that they were not a significant contributor to O3 precursors measured during the case studies.
The process of natural gas extraction known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, is a controversial energy-acquisition technique often viewed with disdain by the public, due to its potential for environmental harm. However, the mental health and psychological well-being of fracking communities, including potential benefits and detriments, is often overlooked. We reviewed the literature on the association between fracking and psychological functioning, finding that although persons living in fracking communities may experience some minimal, initial benefits such as land lease income or infrastructure development, they may also experience worry, anxiety and depression about lifestyle, health, safety and financial security, as well as exposure to neurotoxins and changes to the physical landscape. Indeed, entire communities can experience collective trauma as a result of the “boom/bust” cycle that often occurs when industries impinge on community life. Impacted communities are often already vulnerable, including poor, rural or indigenous persons, who may continue to experience the deleterious effects of fracking for generations. An influx of workers to fracking communities often stokes fears about outsiders and crime; yet, it must be recognized that this population of mobile workers is also vulnerable, often-ostracized and without social support. Practitioners, researchers and policy makers alike should continue to investigate potential psychological ramifications of fracking, so that effective and targeted intervention strategies can be developed, disseminated and implemented to improve mental health in fracking communities.
Background
Oil and gas development emits known hematological carcinogens, such as benzene, and increasingly occurs in residential areas. We explored whether residential proximity to oil and gas development was associated with risk for hematologic cancers using a registry-based case-control study design.
Methods
Participants were 0–24 years old, living in rural Colorado, and diagnosed with cancer between 2001–2013. For each child in our study, we calculated inverse distance weighted (IDW) oil and gas well counts within a 16.1-kilometer radius of residence at cancer diagnosis for each year in a 10 year latency period to estimate density of oil and gas development. Logistic regression, adjusted for age, race, gender, income, and elevation was used to estimate associations across IDW well count tertiles for 87 acute lymphocytic leukemia (ALL) cases and 50 non-Hodgkin lymphoma (NHL) cases, compared to 528 controls with non-hematologic cancers.
Findings
Overall, ALL cases 0–24 years old were more likely to live in the highest IDW well count tertiles compared to controls, but findings differed substantially by age. For ages 5–24, ALL cases were 4.3 times as likely to live in the highest tertile, compared to controls (95% CI: 1.1 to 16), with a monotonic increase in risk across tertiles (trend p-value = 0.035). Further adjustment for year of diagnosis increased the association. No association was found between ALL for children aged 0–4 years or NHL and IDW well counts. While our study benefited from the ability to select cases and controls from the same population, use of cancer-controls, the limited number of ALL and NHL cases, and aggregation of ages into five year ranges, may have biased our associations toward the null. In addition, absence of information on O&G well activities, meteorology, and topography likely reduced temporal and spatial specificity in IDW well counts.
Conclusion
Because oil and gas development has potential to expose a large population to known hematologic carcinogens, further study is clearly needed to substantiate both our positive and negative findings. Future studies should incorporate information on oil and gas development activities and production levels, as well as levels of specific pollutants of interest (e.g. benzene) near homes, schools, and day care centers; provide age-specific residential histories; compare cases to controls without cancer; and address other potential confounders, and environmental stressors.
Introduction: The past decade in the United States has been marked by an unprecedented expansion of unconventional oil and gas drilling, including hydraulic fracturing (i.e., fracking). Concerns have arisen regarding potential health and environmental risks associated with the use of the fracking process. The purpose of this exploratory study was to examine community perceptions, concerns, and knowledge of environmental health issues related to fracking in three Texas counties near one of the most active shale plays in South Texas, the Eagle Ford Shale.Methods: A convenience sample of 153 adults over the age of 18 years in three rural South Texas counties completed a 46-question survey. Demographic information, perceptions of environmental health risks, and knowledge of potential environmental health effects related to fracking were obtained. A validated health literacy measure was also used to assess participants’ health literacy.Results: Participants were predominantly female (61%), white (75%), and Hispanic (62%). A majority owned land (53.6%) and had lived in their respective county for over 21 years (54%). Only 32% percent of participants had marginal or inadequate health literacy though a larger percentage of participants had limited knowledge of potential environmental health risks related to fracking.Conclusions: Approximately one third of participants had less than adequate health literacy as measured by the BRIEF. A high percentage of the population demonstrated limited knowledge regarding the potential environmental health impacts of fracking, suggesting limited environmental health literacy. Findings point to the need for environmental health specific assessments and focused environmental health promotion strategies.
How does local versus absentee ownership of natural resources—and their associated income—shape the relationship between extraction and local income? Theory and empirics on natural resources and the broader economy have focused heavily on labor markets, largely ignoring the economic implications of payments to resource owners. We study how local ownership of oil and gas rights shapes the local income effects of extraction. For the average U.S. county that experienced an increase in oil and gas production from 2000 to 2013, increased royalty income and its associated economic stimulus accounted for more than two-thirds of the total income effect from extraction in 2013. Looking at gross royalty income in particular, which we derive from more than 2.2 million leases across the continental United States, we estimate that each dollar in royalty income led to $0.52 in non-royalty income, largely reflecting greater wage income in the service sector. Overall, a U.S. county with complete local ownership of the subsurface captured 29 cents more of each dollar in production than a county with absentee ownership. For a county with the median shale production in 2013, this would translate to an extra $1,098 per capita, or 5.3 percent of total income.
Environmental justice (EJ) research seeks to document and redress the disproportionate environmental burdens and benefits associated with social inequalities. Although its initial focus was on disparities in exposure to anthropogenic pollution, the scope of EJ research has expanded. In the context of intensifying social inequalities and environmental problems, there is a need to further strengthen the EJ research framework and diversify its application. This Special Issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health (IJERPH) incorporates 19 articles that broaden EJ research by considering emerging topics such as energy, food, drinking water, flooding, sustainability, and gender dynamics, including issues in Canada, the UK, and Eastern Europe. Additionally, the articles contribute to three research themes: (1) documenting connections between unjust environmental exposures and health impacts by examining unsafe infrastructure, substance use, and children’s obesity and academic performance; (2) promoting and achieving EJ by implementing interventions to improve environmental knowledge and health, identifying avenues for sustainable community change, and incorporating EJ metrics in government programs; and (3) clarifying stakeholder perceptions of EJ issues to extend research beyond the documentation of unjust conditions and processes. Collectively, the articles highlight potentially compounding injustices and an array of approaches being employed to achieve EJ.
As growth in unconventional energy production has brought oil and gas development closer to Colorado’s Front Range communities, a desire for more local control over that development has resulted in bans and moratoria in a few communities. Memoranda of understanding (MOUs), signed between local governments and industry operators, are emerging as a policy tool to allow development to proceed while addressing the concerns of local communities. This study analyses how MOUs shape public opinion of unconventional energy production by comparing two communities on the northern edge of the Denver metropolitan area: Erie, which instituted one of the state’s first MOUs in 2012, and nearby Firestone, which does not have MOUs in place. Analysing complaints made to the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission suggests that the MOUs narrow the breadth of citizen complaints and increase citizen engagement with state governing bodies. Finally, we find that the most significant predictor of complaint volume is encroachment of drilling activities close to communities.
Background:
Unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) produces environmental contaminants and psychosocial stressors. Despite these concerns, few studies have evaluated the health effects of UNGD.
Objectives:
We investigated associations between UNGD activity and symptoms in a cross-sectional study in Pennsylvania.
Methods:
We mailed a self-administered questionnaire to 23,700 adult patients of the Geisinger Clinic. Using standardized and validated questionnaire items, we identified respondents with chronic rhinosinusitis (CRS), migraine headache, and fatigue symptoms. We created a summary UNGD activity metric that incorporated well phase, location, total depth, daily gas production and inverse distance-squared to patient residences. We used logistic regression, weighted for sampling and response rates, to assess associations between quartiles of UNGD activity and outcomes, both alone and in combination.
Results:
The response rate was 33%. Of 7,785 study participants, 1,850 (24%) had current CRS symptoms, 1,765 (23%) had migraine headache, and 1,930 (25%) had higher levels of fatigue. Among individuals who met criteria for two or more outcomes, adjusted odds ratios for the highest quartile of UNGD activity compared with the lowest were [OR (95% CI)] 1.49 (0.78, 2.85) for CRS plus migraine, 1.88 (1.08, 3.25) for CRS plus fatigue, 1.95 (1.18, 3.21) for migraine plus fatigue, and 1.84 (1.08, 3.14) for all three outcomes together. Significant associations were also present in some models of single outcomes.
Conclusions:
This study provides evidence that UNGD is associated with nasal and sinus, migraine headache, and fatigue symptoms in a general population representative sample. Citation: Tustin AW, Hirsch AG, Rasmussen SG, Casey JA, Bandeen-Roche K, Schwartz BS. 2017. Associations between unconventional natural gas development and nasal and sinus, migraine headache, and fatigue symptoms in Pennsylvania. Environ Health Perspect 125:189-197; http://dx.doi.org/10.1289/EHP281.
Recent work indicates that oil and gas methane (CH4) inventories for the United States are underestimated. Here we present results from direct measurements of CH4 emissions from 138 abandoned oil and gas wells, a source currently missing from inventories. Most abandoned wells do not emit CH4, but 6.5% of wells had measurable CH4 emissions. 25% percent of wells we visited that had not been plugged emitted > 5 g CH4 hr-1. Stable isotopes indicate that wells emit natural gas and/or coalbed CH4. We estimate that abandoned wells make a small contribution (<1%) to regional CH4 emissions in our study areas. Additional data are needed to accurately determine the contribution of abandoned wells to national CH4 budgets, particularly measurements in other basins and better characterization of the abundance and regional distribution of high emitters.
Background:
There is an increasing awareness of the multiple potential pathways leading to human health risks from hydraulic fracturing. Setback distances are a legislative method to mitigate potential risks.
Objectives:
We attempted to determine whether legal setback distances between well pad sites and the public are adequate in three shale plays.
Methods:
We reviewed geography, current statutes and regulations, evacuations, thermal modeling, air pollution studies, and vapor cloud modeling within the Marcellus, Barnett, and Niobrara Shale Plays.
Discussion:
The evidence suggests that presently utilized setbacks may leave the public vulnerable to explosions, radiant heat, toxic gas clouds, and air pollution from hydraulic fracturing activities.
Conclusions:
Our results suggest that setbacks may not be sufficient to reduce potential threats to human health in areas where hydraulic fracturing occurs. It is more likely that a combination of reasonable setbacks with controls for other sources of pollution associated with the process will be required.
This letter presents a distributive environmental justice analysis of unconventional gas development in the area of Pennsylvania lying over the Marcellus Shale, the largest shale gas formation in play in the United States. The extraction of shale gas using unconventional wells, which are hydraulically fractured (fracking), has increased dramatically since 2005. As the number of wells has grown, so have concerns about the potential public health effects on nearby communities. These concerns make shale gas development an environmental justice issue. This letter examines whether the hazards associated with proximity to wells and the economic benefits of shale gas production are fairly distributed. We distinguish two types of distributive environmental justice: traditional and benefit sharing. We ask the traditional question: are there a disproportionate number of minority or low-income residents in areas near to unconventional wells in Pennsylvania? However, we extend this analysis in two ways: we examine income distribution and level of education; and we compare before and after shale gas development. This contributes to discussions of benefit sharing by showing how the income distribution of the population has changed. We use a binary dasymetric technique to remap the data from the 2000 US Census and the 2009–2013 American Communities Survey and combine that data with a buffer containment analysis of unconventional wells to compare the characteristics of the population living nearer to unconventional wells with those further away before and after shale gas development. Our analysis indicates that there is no evidence of traditional distributive environmental injustice: there is not a disproportionate number of minority or low-income residents in areas near to unconventional wells. However, our analysis is consistent with the claim that there is benefit sharing distributive environmental injustice: the income distribution of the population nearer to shale gas wells has not been transformed since shale gas development.
How do climate risk beliefs affect coastal housing markets? This paper provides theoretical and empirical evidence. First, we build a dynamic housing market model and show that belief heterogeneity can reconcile prior mixed evidence on flood risk capitalization. Second, we implement a door-to-door survey in Rhode Island, finding significant flood risk underestimation and sorting based on risk perceptions and amenity values. Third, we estimate that coastal prices exceed fundamentals by 6$\%$-13$\%$ in our benchmark area, with potentially higher overvaluation in other locations. Finally, we quantify both allocative inefficiency and distributional consequences arising from flood risk misperceptions and insurance policy reform.
Authors have furnished an Internet Appendix, which is available on the Oxford University Press Web site next to the link to the final published paper online.
This paper measures the effects of bankruptcy protection on industry structure and environmental outcomes in oil and gas extraction. Using administrative data from Texas, I exploit variation in an insurance requirement that reduced firms' ability to avoid liability through bankruptcy. Among small firms, the policy substantially improved environmental outcomes and reduced production. Most production was reallocated to larger firms with better environmental records, but high-cost production where social cost may have exceeded social benefit decreased. These results suggest that incomplete internalization of environmental costs due to bankruptcy is an important determinant of industry structure and safety effort in hazardous industries.
This article presents evidence on the distributional effects of energy extraction by examining the effect of the recent U.S. energy boom on wage rates and housing. The boom increased local wage rates in almost every major occupational category. The increase occurred regardless of whether the occupation experienced a corresponding change in employment, suggesting a tighter labor market that benefited local workers. Wage rates also increased substantially across the entire wage rate distribution, although the percentage increase was slightly higher at the bottom of the distribution than at the top. Local housing values and rental prices both increased, thereby benefiting landowners. For renters, the increase in prices was completely offset by a contemporaneous increase in income. The results suggest that bans on drilling have negative monetary consequences for a large share of local residents. (JEL J23, Q33, R31)
Research on unconventional oil and gas (UOG) development has focused so intently on hydraulic fracturing that it has overlooked “fracking's” partner technology, horizontal drilling (HZD), which now enables operators to drill more than 2.5 miles. This innovation merits examination because it generates opportunities and challenges – in tension – for regions experiencing UOG development. HZD allows operators to condense their surface impacts by drilling multiple wells per pad. This consolidation benefits the many in a given extractive area, but at the expense of the few who live near intensified sites. HZD also allows operators to more flexibly position these large well pads. Combined, these drilling innovations are further splintering an already fragmented UOG governance space and creating novel procedural fairness challenges, especially in cities. This study offers the concept of “piecemeal participation” to describe these challenges, drawing from a case study in Colorado. Piecemeal participation occurs when governments structure public input on a site-by-site basis, while operators, leveraging HZD's reach and flexibility, plan drilling and weigh alternative drilling locations at the scale of the city. The analysis evaluates piecemeal participation using standard procedural fairness criteria, generating findings of broader relevance as urban areas anticipate UOG development and HZD worldwide.
This research exploits the introduction of shale gas wells in Pennsylvania in response to growing controversy around the drilling method of hydraulic fracturing. Using detailed location data on maternal addresses and GIS coordinates of gas wells, this study examines singleton births to mothers residing close to a shale gas well from 2003 to 2010 in Pennsylvania. The introduction of drilling increased low birth weight and decreased term birth weight on average among mothers living within 2.5 km of a well compared to mothers living within 2.5 km of a permitted well. Adverse effects were also detected using measures such as small for gestational age and APGAR scores, while no effects on gestation periods were found. In the intensive margin, an additional well is associated with a 7 percent increase in low birth weight, a 5 g reduction in term birth weight and a 3 percent increase in premature birth. These results are robust to other measures of infant health, many changes in specification and falsification tests. These findings suggest that shale gas development poses significant risks to human health.
Oil and gas exploration and development have a long history and remain important in the American West. The region supported 150,000 well completions from 2000 to 2017. In the same timeframe, unconventional oil and gas development in the West’s Niobrara and Bakken formations contributed 28% of United States shale oil production and 14% of shale gas yields. This essay introduces the concept of “impact geography” as a guiding framework for synthesizing literature on social impacts of unconventional oil and gas development and deploys the concept in a review of recent published literature on social impacts in the region. The impact geography approach reflects the fact that that social impacts are generated by, and contingent upon, interactions between economic cycles, geology, technology and local context as they occur in particular spaces and places. This review of social impacts, broadly defined, is organized around three major impact geographies: rural and remote; (sub) urban; and sovereign nations. Within these geographies, we identify a variety of places—boomtowns, industrialized countrysides, borderlands, petro-suburbs, and focusing sites —and survey the impacts that stakeholders within them have experienced as they have been reported in the academic literature.
To be poor, working-class, or a person of color in the United States often means bearing a disproportionate share of the country’s environmental problems. Starting with the premise that all Americans have a basic right to live in a healthy environment, Dumping in Dixie chronicles the efforts of five African American communities, empowered by the civil rights movement, to link environmentalism with issues of social justice. In the third edition, Bullard speaks to us from the front lines of the environmental justice movement about new developments in environmental racism, different organizing strategies, and success stories in the struggle for environmental equity.
Oil and gas (O&G) facilities emit air pollutants that are potentially a major health risk for nearby populations. We characterized prenatal through adult health risks for acute (1-hour) and chronic (30-year) residential inhalation exposure scenarios to non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHCs) for these populations. We used ambient air sample results to estimate and compare risks for four residential scenarios. We found that air pollutant concentrations increased with proximity to an O&G facility, as did health risks. Acute hazard indices for neurological (18), hematological (15), and developmental (15) health effects indicate that populations living within 152 meters of an O&G facility could experience these health effects from inhalation exposures to benzene and alkanes. Lifetime excess cancer risks exceeded 1 in a million for all scenarios. The cancer risk estimate of 8.3 per 10,000 for populations living within 152 meters of an O&G facility exceeded the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s 1 in 10,000 upper threshold. These findings indicate that state and federal regulatory policies may not be protective of health for populations residing near O&G facilities. Health risk assessment results can be used for informing policies and studies aimed at reducing and understanding health effects associated with air pollutants emitted from O&G facilities.
Extensive research over the last five years has demonstrated that those who live near hydraulic fracturing wells and their associated infrastructure are at risk of a variety of health problems. Along with knowledge of these risks comes the ethical question of who is bearing these risks and how decisions are made about who bears the risks. This article reviews how environmental justice scholars have addressed the ethical concerns raised by the fracking boom. It draws out how this work relates to the three main types of environmental justice: distributive, procedural and recognition-based environmental justice.
As unconventional natural gas development (UNGD) activities such as “fracking” have proliferated across the U.S., research has begun to examine their impacts on human life. Much scholarship has centered on possible health and environmental impacts. However, a range of plausible psychosocial impacts has begun to emerge. Utilizing grounded theory methods and data from qualitative interviews with residents of two counties in Appalachian Eastern Ohio (Guernsey and Noble), we examined the quality of life (QoL) impacts on residents, who live and work amid UNGD. QoL impacts were reported in five core categories, specifically psychological stress, social stress, environment, physical health, and traffic. Psychological stress was a particularly salient theme, as residents living near UNGD found themselves anxious about the uncertainties of fracking; frustrated by interactions with oil and gas industry officials; stressed about noise or light pollution; and, in some instances, facing the possibility of moving from the region.
From 2002 to 2015, the Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex (DFW) experienced high population growth rates and booming shale gas production via hydraulic fracturing of the Barnett Shale. In response, DFW municipalities adopted gas well drilling ordinances and enacted setback distance policies to regulate the proximity between new gas wells and homes. However, landscape and planning impacts arising from subsequent development of homes around hydrocarbon extraction sites are unknown. Here, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to 1) quantify spatial and land-use effects of gas well production sites, 2) identify municipal staff perspectives on overlapping gas well and suburban landscapes, and 3) evaluate municipal governance strategies for dealing with subsequent development of homes around production sites. Our results show that production sites occupy approximately 3000 ha in DFW and nearly 2% of surface areas in some high growth municipalities. Over time, developed land covers increasingly surrounded gas production sites. We identified three statistically significant social perspectives among municipal officials, two indicating concern with how gas wells impede future urban development. The majority of municipal governments place the onus on homebuyers to decide whether to live near gas wells, though a few municipalities require notification of their presence. The parallel pressures to develop surface and mineral interests by two powerful industries – property developers and oil and gas operators, respectively – create a complex regulatory and planning environment for municipalities where protections of resident health, safety, and welfare are left to the discretion of corporate entities and social licenses.
New technologies like hydraulic fracturing and directional drilling have ushered in a boom of domestic oil and gas production in the United States. Oil and gas drilling often occurs in close proximity to where people live and work, creating the potential for significant quality of life impacts. In this review, we integrate across diverse literatures to develop a holistic account of how oil and gas development might impact quality of life in host communities. Our review suggests that the potential effect of oil and gas development is complex, as it can provide economic growth for beleaguered rural areas but also degrade human health, environmental quality and have other deleterious impacts. We conclude by suggesting directions for future research.
Beginning in the 2000s, the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan region became home to the world's largest and longest experiment in urban shale gas production, with 25,182 drilling permits issued from 2000 to 2016 in the Barnett Shale. Urban hydrocarbon governance centered on establishing statutory setback distances between drilling sites and nearest houses or other protected uses. Here we analyze qualitative interview data obtained with a rigorous sampling frame to examine processes and outcomes of municipal-level hydrocarbon governance. We find that early municipal responses (2001–2002) revealed lack of technical expertise to respond to unconventional drilling and production. Controversial wells, which residents considered too close to houses, focused governance debates in several municipalities. Municipal policymakers reported that protecting public health and safety were top priorities in determining setbacks. After 2003, policymakers copied ordinance language from neighboring municipalities and established task forces and working groups to reduce political tensions. The role of the hydrocarbon industry included frequent claims seeking to exploit the longstanding separation of mineral and property estates, which encouraged municipalities to reduce setbacks and lower potential exposure to regulatory takings lawsuits. Over time, municipal regulatory power in hydrocarbon governance decreased while industry power increased, offering several implications for corporate responsibility and social license debates.
Background:
Higher risk of exposure to environmental health hazards near oil and gas wells has spurred interest in quantifying populations that live in proximity to oil and gas development. The available studies on this topic lack consistent methodology and ignore aspects of oil and gas development of value to public health-relevant assessment and decision-making.
Objectives:
We aim to present a methodological framework for oil and gas development proximity studies grounded in an understanding of hydrocarbon geology and development techniques.
Methods:
We geospatially overlay locations of active oil and gas wells in the conterminous United States and Census data to estimate the population living in proximity to hydrocarbon development at the national and state levels. We compare our methods and findings with existing proximity studies.
Results:
Nationally, we estimate that 17.6 million people live within 1,600m (∼1 mi) of at least one active oil and/or gas well. Three of the eight studies overestimate populations at risk from actively producing oil and gas wells by including wells without evidence of production or drilling completion and/or using inappropriate population allocation methods. The remaining five studies, by omitting conventional wells in regions dominated by historical conventional development, significantly underestimate populations at risk.
Conclusions:
The well inventory guidelines we present provide an improved methodology for hydrocarbon proximity studies by acknowledging the importance of both conventional and unconventional well counts as well as the relative exposure risks associated with different primary production categories (e.g., oil, wet gas, dry gas) and developmental stages of wells. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP1535.
Oil and gas (O&G) production in the United States has increased in the last 15 years and operations, which are trending towards large multi-well pads, release hazardous air pollutants. Health studies have relied on proximity to O&G wells as an exposure metric, typically using an inverse distance weighting (IDW) approach. Since O&G emissions are dependent on multiple factors, a dynamic model is needed to describe the variability in air pollution emissions over space and time. We used information on Colorado O&G activities, production volumes, and air pollutant emission rates from two Colorado basins to create a spatiotemporal industrial activity model to develop an intensity-adjusted IDW well count metric. The Spearman correlation coefficient between this metric and measured pollutant concentrations was 0.74. We applied our model to households in Greeley, Colorado, which is in the middle of the densely developed Denver-Julesburg basin. Our intensity-adjusted IDW increased the unadjusted IDW dynamic range by a factor of 19 and distinguishes high intensity events, such as hydraulic fracturing/flowback, from lower intensity events, such as production at single well pads. As the frequency of multi-well pads increases, it will become increasingly important to characterize the range of intensities at O&G sites when conducting epidemiological studies.
In 2012 Pennsylvania amended its Oil and Gas Act to tighten regulations on development of shale gas resources. Three key pecuniary provisions were annual well fees, increased bonding requirements, and higher penalty limits for violations. We analyze the effects of these mandates on well operator behavior using data on well operations and inspections over the period 2000-2013. After deriving theoretical predictions, we empirically examine each provision’s effect on firm behavior in two aspects: (i) acquisition of new well permits, and (ii) regulatory violations. Overall, we find the amendments induced firms to acquire fewer permits and elevate environmental protection effort.
In cooperation with The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, researchers at Colorado State University performed area noise monitoring at 23 oil and gas sites throughout Northern Colorado. The goals of this study were to: (1) Randall, B. (Director) (2012, March 7). Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Rules and Regulations. BLM Colorado Resource Advisory Councils. Lecture conducted from Colorado Department of Natural Resources, .http://www.blm.gov/pgdata/etc/medialib/blm/co/resources/resource_advisory/2012_super_rac.Par.83149.File.dat/COGCC.pdf [Google Scholar] measure and compare the noise levels for the different phases of oil and gas development sites; (2) Wirfs-Brock, J. (n.d.). Groundwater, Noise, Odors Top Colorado Oil & Gas Complaints. Inside Energy. Retrieved July 1, 2014. [Google Scholar] evaluate the effectiveness of noise barriers; and (3) Oil and Gas Drilling/Development Impacts. (n.d.) Retrieved 2015, from http://teeic.indianaffairs.gov/er/oilgas/impact/drilldev/ determine if noise levels exceeded the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission noise limits. The four phases of oil and gas development include drilling, hydraulic fracturing, completion and production. Noise measurements were collected using the A- and C-weighted sound scales. Octave band analysis was also performed to characterize the frequency spectra of the noise measurements.
Noise measurements were collected using noise dosimeters and a hand-held sound-level meter at specified distances from the development sites in each cardinal direction. At 350 feet (ft) [107 meters (m)], drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and completion sites without noise barriers exceeded the maximum permissible noise levels for residential and commercial zones (55 dBA and 60 dBA, respectively). In addition, drilling and hydraulic fracturing sites with noise barriers exceeded the maximum permissible noise level for residential zones (55 dBA). However, during drilling, hydraulic fracturing, and completion operations, oil producers are allowed an exception to the noise permissible limits in that they only must comply with the industrial noise limit (80dBA). It is stated in Rule 604.c.(2) Wirfs-Brock, J. (n.d.). Groundwater, Noise, Odors Top Colorado Oil & Gas Complaints. Inside Energy. Retrieved July 1, 2014. [Google Scholar]A. that; “Operations involving pipeline or gas facility installation or maintenance, the use of a drilling rig, completion rig, workover rig, or stimulation is subject to the maximum permissible noise levels for industrial zones (80dBA).”⁽⁸⁾ Aesthetic and Noise Control Regulations. (2013). Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission Production sites were within the Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission permissible noise level criteria for all zones. At 350 ft (107 m) from the noise source, all drilling, hydraulic fracturing and completion sites exceeded 65 dBC.
Current noise wall mitigation strategies reduced noise levels in both the A- and C-weighted scale measurements. However, this reduction in noise was not sufficient enough to reduce the noise below the residential permissible noise level (55 dBA).
In the fight between state versus local control in Colorado's unconventional energy industry, Memorandums of Understanding (MOUs) signed directly between operators and local governments are becoming an increasingly popular strategy for formally integrating citizen concerns into oil and gas development. Yet little is known about how these agreements may shape public opinion of industry and local government. This article uses mixed methods to investigate if and how MOUs shaped public perceptions of the industry and the town government in a politically heterogeneous suburban Colorado town home to the state's first MOU. While public comments have become significantly more favorable toward oil and gas development over time, our research reveals that the MOU itself did not significantly change those perceptions. The more significant factor was the election of a town board committed to processes of engagement and transparency, including a meaningful revision of the original MOU.
This paper quantifies the local economic impacts of hydraulic fracturing. We match extremely detailed oil and natural gas well data to county-level aggregate and sectoral employment data. Controlling for time-varying unobserved determinants of job growth, we find approximately 550,000 local jobs attributable to the shale boom. While this is substantial, it is smaller than previous studies. We also show that the effects are heterogeneous across sectors. Impacts are concentrated in extractive industries, in local non-tradable and service sectors, and in areas with the largest increase in drilling activity.
The combining of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing unleashed a boom in oil and natural gas production in the US. This technological shift interacts with local geology to create an exogenous shock to county income and employment. We measure the effects of these shocks within the county where production occurs and track their geographic propagation. Every million dollars of oil and gas extracted produces $66,000 in wage income, $61,000 in royalty payments, and 0.78 jobs within the county. Outside the immediate county but within the region, the economic impacts are over three times larger. Within 100 miles of the new production, one million dollars generates $243,000 in wages, $117,000 in royalties, and 2.49 jobs. Thus, over a third of the fracking revenue stays within the regional economy. Our results suggest new oil and gas extraction led to an increase in aggregate US employment of 725,000 and a 0.5 percent decrease in the unemployment rate during the Great Recession.
In the 21st century, the U.S. has experienced a boom in unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD). In part due to advances in technology, this rapid increase in UOGD has moved extraction practices into geographic areas that have previously seen little or no oil and gas development. As a result, conflicts over property rights have erupted—particularly in relation to split estate situations. To understand this controversy, we must situate it in the conditions which have shaped land use and mineral rights. We argue that past federal and state level governance decisions have created the conditions for UOGD conflicts today. Here, we utilize historical institutionalism (HI) to review the historical actors, processes, and institutions that have shaped how mineral rights have developed in the context of split estates in the U.S. We suggest that tracing this legislative and judicial history through HI is an essential foundation for exploring issues related to UOGD. Most importantly, we highlight these processes of governance as a bedrock for understanding spatial inequality inherent in current split estate law that grants the mineral estate dominance over the surface estate. We suggest that this codification of spatial inequality is problematic both in and beyond the context of split estates in UOGD.
Unconventional oil and gas extraction (UOGE) has spurred an unprecedented boom in onshore production in the US. Despite a surge in related research, a void exists regarding inquiries into policy outcomes and perceptions. To address this, support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE is examined using survey data collected in 2015 from two Northern Colorado communities. Current regulatory exemptions for UOGE can be understood as components of broader societal processes of neoliberalization. Free market ideology increases public support for federal regulatory exemptions for UOGE. Perceived negative impacts do not necessarily drive people to support increased federal regulation. Utilizing neo-Polanyian theory, interaction between free market ideology and perceived negative impacts is explored. Free market ideology appears to moderate people’s views of regulation: increasing the effect of perceived negative impacts while simultaneously increasing support for deregulation. To conclude, the ways in which free market ideology might normalize the impacts of UOGE activity are discussed.
Modern oil and gas development frequently occurs in close proximity to human populations and increased levels of ambient noise have been documented throughout some phases of development. Numerous studies have evaluated air and water quality degradation and human exposure pathways, but few have evaluated potential health risks and impacts from environmental noise exposure. We reviewed the scientific literature on environmental noise exposure to determine the potential concerns, if any, that noise from oil and gas development activities present to public health. Data on noise levels associated with oil and gas development are limited, but measurements can be evaluated amidst the large body of epidemiology assessing the non-auditory effects of environmental noise exposure and established public health guidelines for community noise. There are a large number of noise dependent and subjective factors that make the determination of a dose response relationship between noise and health outcomes difficult. However, the literature indicates that oil and gas activities produce noise at levels that may increase the risk of adverse health outcomes, including annoyance, sleep disturbance, and cardiovascular disease. More studies that investigate the relationships between noise exposure and human health risks from unconventional oil and gas development are warranted. Finally, policies and mitigation techniques that limit human exposure to noise from oil and gas operations should be considered to reduce health risks.
We evaluated population size and factors influencing environmental justice near oil and gas (O&G) wells. We mapped nearest O&G well to residential properties to evaluate population size, temporal relationships between housing and O&G development, and 2012 housing market value distributions in three major Colorado O&G basins. We reviewed land use, building, real estate, and state O&G regulations to evaluate distributive and participatory justice. We found that by 2012 at least 378,000 Coloradans lived within 1-mile of an active O&G well, and this population was growing at a faster rate than the overall population. In the Denver Julesburg and San Juan basins, which experienced substantial O&G development prior to 2000, we observed a larger proportion of lower value homes within 500 feet of an O&G well and that most O&G wells predated houses. In the Piceance Basin, which had not experienced substantial prior O&G development, we observed a larger proportion of high value homes within 500 feet of an O&G well and that most houses predated O&G wells. We observed economic, rural, participatory, and/or distributive injustices that could contribute to health risk vulnerabilities in populations near O&G wells. We encourage policy makers to consider measures to reduce these injustices.
Oil and natural gas operations have continued to expand and move closer to densely populated areas, contributing to growing public concerns regarding exposure to hazardous air pollutants. During the Barnett Shale Coordinated Campaign in October, 2013, ground-based whole air samples collected downwind of oil and gas sites revealed enhancements in several potentially toxic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) when compared to background values. Molar emissions ratios relative to methane were determined for hexane, benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylenes (BTEX compounds). Using methane leak rates measured from the Picarro mobile flux plane (MFP) system and a Barnett Shale regional methane emissions inventory, the rates of emission of these toxic gases were calculated. Benzene emissions ranged between 51 ± 4 and 60 ± 4 kg hr-1. Hexane, the most abundantly emitted pollutant, ranged from 642 ± 45 to 1070 ± 340 kg hr-1. While observed hydrocarbon enhancements fall below federal workplace standards, results may indicate a link between emissions from oil and natural gas operations and concerns about exposure to hazardous air pollutants. The larger public health risks associated with the production and distribution of natural gas are of particular importance, and warrant further investigation, particularly as the use of natural gas increases in the United States and internationally.
High time resolution measurements of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) were collected using a proton-transfer-reaction quadrupole mass spectrometry (PTR-QMS) instrument at the Platteville Atmospheric Observatory (PAO) in Colorado to investigate how oil and natural gas (O&NG) development impacts air quality within the Wattenburg Gas Field (WGF) in the Denver-Julesburg Basin. The measurements were carried out in July and August 2014 as part of NASA's DISCOVER-AQ field campaign. The PTR-QMS data were supported by pressurized whole air canister samples and airborne vertical and horizontal surveys of VOCs. Unexpectedly high benzene mixing ratios were observed at PAO at ground level (mean benzene = 0.53 ppbv, maximum benzene = 29.3 ppbv), primarily at night (mean nighttime benzene = 0.73 ppbv). These high benzene levels were associated with southwesterly winds. The airborne measurements indicate that benzene originated from within the WGF, and typical source signatures detected in the canister samples implicate emissions from O&NG activities rather than urban vehicular emissions as primary benzene source. This conclusion is backed by a regional toluene-to-benzene ratio analysis which associated southerly flow with vehicular emissions from the Denver area. Weak benzene-to-CO correlations confirmed that traffic emissions were not responsible for the observed high benzene levels. Previous measurements at the Boulder Atmospheric Observatory (BAO) and our data obtained at PAO allow us to locate the source of benzene enhancements between the two atmospheric observatories. Fugitive emissions of benzene from O&NG operations in the Platteville area are discussed as the most likely causes of enhanced benzene levels at PAO.
Tropospheric O3 has been decreasing across much of the eastern U.S. but has remained steady or even increased in some western regions. Recent increases in VOC and NOx emissions associated with the production of oil and natural gas (O&NG) may contribute to this trend in some areas. The Northern Front Range of Colorado has regularly exceeded O3 air quality standards during summertime in recent years. This region has VOC emissions from a rapidly developing O&NG basin and low concentrations of biogenic VOC in close proximity to urban-Denver NOx emissions. Here VOC OH reactivity (OHR), O3 production efficiency (OPE), and an observationally constrained box model are used to quantify the influence of O&NG emissions on regional summertime O3 production. Analyses are based on measurements acquired over two summers at a central location within the Northern Front Range that lies between major regional O&NG and urban emission sectors. Observational analyses suggest that mixing obscures any OPE differences in air primarily influenced by O&NG or urban emission sector. The box model confirms relatively modest OPE differences that are within the uncertainties of the field observations. Box model results also indicate that maximum O3 at the measurement location is sensitive to changes in NOx mixing ratio but also responsive to O&NG VOC reductions. Combined, these analyses show that O&NG alkanes contribute over 80% to the observed carbon mixing ratio, roughly 50% to the regional VOC OHR, and approximately 20% to regional photochemical O3 production.