Vohra, Karn;
Marais, Eloise A;
Achakulwisut, Ploy;
Anenberg, Susan;
Harkins, Colin;
(2025)
The health burden and racial-ethnic disparities of air pollution from the major oil and gas lifecycle stages in the United States.
Science Advances
, 11
(34)
, Article eadu2241. 10.1126/sciadv.adu2241.
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Abstract
The United States has one of the world’s largest oil and gas (O&G) industries, yet the health impacts and inequities from pollutants produced along the O&G lifecycle remain poorly characterized. Here, we model the contribution of major lifecycle stages (upstream, midstream, downstream, and end-use) to air pollution and estimate the associated chronic health outcomes and racial-ethnic disparities across the contiguous US in 2017. We estimate lifecycle annual burdens of 91,000 premature deaths attributable to fine particles (PM2.5), nitrogen dioxide (NO2), and ozone, 10,350 PM2.5-attributable preterm births, 216,000 incidences of NO2-attributable childhood-onset asthma, and 1610 lifetime cancers attributable to hazardous air pollutants (HAPs). Racial-ethnic minorities experience the greatest disparities in exposure and health burdens across almost all lifecycle stages. The greatest absolute disparities occur for Black and Asian populations from PM2.5 and ozone, and the Asian population from NO2 and HAPs. Relative inequities are most extreme from downstream activities, especially in Louisiana and Texas.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | The health burden and racial-ethnic disparities of air pollution from the major oil and gas lifecycle stages in the United States |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1126/sciadv.adu2241 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adu2241 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | Copyright © 2025 The Authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee American Association for the Advancement of Science. No claim to original U.S. Government Works. Distributed under a Creative Commons Attribution License 4.0 (CC BY). https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Dept of Geography |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10212620 |
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