Air pollution from oil and gas causes 90,000 premature US deaths each year, says new study, Study analyzed health impacts of fossil fuels from exploration to end use, and found communities of color bear brunt of harm by Dharna Noor, 22 Aug 2025, The Guardian
Air pollution from oil and gas causes more than 90,000 premature deaths and sickens hundreds of thousands of people across the US each year, a new study shows, with disproportionately high impacts on communities of color.
More than 10,000 annual pre-term births are attributable to fine particulate matter from oil and gas, the authors found, also linking 216,000 annual childhood-onset asthma cases to the sector’s nitrogen dioxide emissions and 1,610 annual lifetime cancer cases to its hazardous air pollutants.
The highest number of impacts are seen in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, while the per-capita incidences are highest in New Jersey, Washington DC, New York, California and Maryland.
The analysis by researchers at University College London and the Stockholm Environment Institute is the first to examine the health impacts – and unequal health burdens – caused by every stage of the oil and gas supply chain, from exploration to end use.
“We’ve long known that these communities are exposed to such levels of inequitable exposure as well as health burden,” said Karn Vohra, a postdoctoral research fellow in geography at University College London, who led the paper. “We were able to just put numbers to what that looks like.”
While Indigenous and Hispanic populations are most affected by pollution from exploration, extraction, transportation and storage, Black and Asian populations are most affected by emissions from processing, refining, manufacturing, distribution and usage.
Though the latter set of activities is responsible for less air pollution overall than the former, the study shows they cause the most unequal health burden, with impacts concentrated in majority-Black areas including southern Louisiana’s “Cancer Alley” and eastern Texas.
“What makes the study so valuable is how it dissects health impacts across the whole life cycle of oil and gas – from where it comes out of the ground to where it is combusted,” Timothy Donaghy, research director for the environmental group Greenpeace USA and author of previous research on the racially uneven burdens of fossil fuel pollution. “As many studies have found before, these health burdens are not shared equally – a prime example of fossil fuel racism in action.”
For the analysis, published in Science Advances on Friday, the authors developed an inventory of each stage of oil and gas production and use, with data from the federal government and the University of Colorado Boulder. They plugged that data into a computer model to track pollution from each source, and used epidemiological and health data to track the adverse impacts of those emissions.
These disproportionate impacts are not inexplicable; rather, they are attributable to historic policies such as redlining – a discriminatory mortgage appraisal practice used after the Great Depression by the US government – and high rates of permitting for oil and gas processing plants in close proximity to Black communities.
Oil and gas are responsible for a major share of all air pollution-attributable health impacts in the US, the authors also found: one in five pre-term births and adult deaths linked to fine particulate pollution are from the sector, the authors found, while a stunning 90% of new childhood asthma cases tied to nitrogen dioxide pollution are from oil and gas.
The study is based on data from 2017, the most recent year of complete data available. Between that year and 2023, US oil and gas production has increased by 40% and consumption by 8%, meaning the estimates are probably highly conservative.
The research comes as the Trump administration works to boost fossil fuel production and suppress renewable energy production.
“Given the reckless deregulation being pushed by Trump’s EPA and the president’s call to ‘drill, baby, drill’, this new study should be a flashing red warning light for the nation,” said Donaghy.
Eloise Marais, a University College London professor of geography and study co-author, said she hoped the study was “picked up by the kinds of community leaders and advocacy groups that are pushing for exposure to cleaner air”.
“If there was a move away from reliance on oil and gas, we would experience the climate change benefits 50, 100, 200 years from today because the greenhouse gases stay in the atmosphere so long,” she said.
“But communities would experience the health benefits immediately.”
The health burden and racial-ethnic disparities of air pollution from the major oil and gas lifecycle stages in the United States by Karn Vohra, Eloise A. Marais, Ploy Achakulwisut, Susan Anenberg and Colin Harkins, Aug 22, 2025, Science Advances Vol 11, Issue 34
- Abstract
- INTRODUCTION
- RESULTS
- DISCUSSION
- MATERIALS AND METHODS
- Acknowledgments
- Supplementary Materials
- REFERENCES AND NOTES
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.
Meanwhile:
Timmons Roberts @timmonsroberts.bsky.social Aug 25, 2025;
My lab’s been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c…
Law Firm Pressures Brown University to Erase Research on Anti-Wind Groups
And here’s more details just up from Bloomberg (gift). 2/n www.bloomberg.com/news/article…
Offshore Wind Opponents Target Work of Brown University Researcher
The group asked for the retraction of work led by Timmons Roberts and said it is preparing to escalate the matter to the Trump administration.
On August 11th, the lawyers for a local anti-wind group here in Rhode Island called Green Oceans sent a letter to Brown University demanding they take down three papers by my Climate and Development Lab. 3/n
They claim the papers “have false and injurious claims about Green Oceans, were published without academic rigor or ethical oversight, and have caused reputational, financial, and physical harm to Green Oceans and its Members.” 4/n
These were two policy briefings and a peer-reviewed article produced by undergraduates under my supervision in 2023 and 2024. The letter demands that Brown take the work off its websites. Here’s the work: www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/anti-offshor…
Anti-Offshore Wind Network | CDL
What was new: “We are preparing coordinated reports to key public and private funding bodies–including the [NSF, DOE], and Mellon Foundation–documenting the pattern of misconduct and the institutional risks of continued association with research units that engage in political targeting.”
Also new: this letter is from Marzulla Law, the same lawyers who represented them against federal agencies about the huge Revolution Wind project–which the Trump Administration froze on Friday without justification (see our Congress briefing on the national security red herring). 7/n
Nancie and Roger Marzulla are hard-right libertarian lawyers who have been fighting major environmental laws and programs since the 1980s. Now they’re using regulations such as NEPA, ESA, MMPA and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act to seek to shut down four major wind projects up and down the coast. 8/n
The Marzullas’ connections include the Reagan and Trump Administrations, oil producers, tobacco firms, and they were members of the Cooler Heads Coalition, a famous climate denialist coalition, with ties to Heartland, Heritage, CEI, ALEC and SPN, most of whom are Koch-funded. 9/n
We have a brand new paper, again by a team of crack undergrads, about the networks of these anti-wind lawyers. The Marcella case happened to be first. 10/n www.climatedevlab.brown.edu/post/legal-e…
Today we released a new CDL report: “Legal Entanglements: Mapping Connections of Anti-Offshore Wind Groups and their Lawyers in the Eastern United States,” a deep look into litigation efforts against …
Here’s the network centered around Marcella Law. No doubt there is much more to this story. 11/n
125 documents are in the Anti-Environmental Archives authored by or citing the work of the Marzullas, including this hot take 12/n www.documentcloud.org/documents/13…
Roger Marzulla was the second president of the Mountain States Legal Foundation, which “worked to weaken theEndangered Species Act, the Wilderness Act, The Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, the Superfund Program and theClean Water Act.” www.documentcloud.org/documents/15…
