91,000 premature deaths tied to oil and gas emissions

A new study has revealed that in the United States, air pollution from the full oil and gas lifecycle contributes to around 91,000 premature deaths annually, along with hundreds of thousands of additional health complications.

The study was conducted by an international team including UCL, the Stockholm Environment Institute, George Washington University and the University of Colorado Boulder. It is the first research to comprehensively quantify the health impacts of air pollution across every stage of oil and gas production – from extraction and transport to refining and consumer use – while also examining racial and ethnic disparities.

Dr Karn Vohra from the University of Birmingham explains: ‘We used a state-of-the-science air quality model to separate air pollution caused by each major stage of the oil and gas lifecycle from other sources of air pollution. This enabled us to work out and compare health outcomes.’

Findings show that the final end-use stage, where fossil fuels are burned, is responsible for 96% of the health burden. In addition to premature deaths, pollution from the sector causes an estimated 10,350 pre-term births, 216,000 new cases of childhood asthma and more than 1,600 lifetime cancer cases each year in the U.S.

Dr Vohra adds: ‘What we found was striking: one in five preterm births and adult deaths linked to fine particulate pollution are from oil and gas. Even more concerning is that nearly 90% of new childhood asthma cases tied to nitrogen dioxide pollution were from this sector.’

The states with the highest overall impacts include California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania and New Jersey. When adjusted for population size, New Jersey, the District of Columbia and Maryland emerge as the hardest hit.

The study also highlights that Native American and Hispanic communities bear the brunt of upstream and midstream emissions, while Black and Asian populations face disproportionate risks from downstream and end-use stages.

In regions such as Louisiana’s ‘Cancer Alley,’ Black residents are significantly more vulnerable to severe outcomes including premature death and childhood asthma.

But as Professor Eloise Marais, at UCL and senior author on the paper, points out: ‘It is well known that air pollution from oil and gas activities causes certain communities to experience worse health outcomes. These communities are already aware of this unjust exposure and the disproportionately large health burdens they experience. Our study puts science-backed numbers on just how large these unfair exposures and health outcomes are.’

Researchers attribute much of this disparity to historical zoning practices like redlining, which concentrated marginalised populations near industrial and traffic-related pollution sources.

The study further found that U.S. oil and gas pollution also contributes to premature deaths in neighboring Canada and Mexico, underlining its transboundary reach.