Nearly 15% of Americans live within a mile of fossil fuel infrastructure

A new study estimates that 46.6 million people in the U.S. — largely urban and non-White residents — live within about a mile (1.6 km) of at least one piece of fossil fuel infrastructure that may be harmful to their health.

The first-of-its-kind study by Boston University School of Public Health, published in Environmental Research Letters, said that figure represents 14.1 percent of of the total U.S. population.

End-use infrastructure has the most people residing within 1.6 km, with 20.9 million people, followed by extraction (20.3 million), and storage (6.16 million), the study said. Almost 90% of the population near end use, transportation, refining, and storage infrastructure are in urban areas, it added.

The results represent a “substantial population in the U.S. that is potentially exposed to hazards that are not well-characterized, with unknown cumulative impacts, and which constitute a major environmental justice issue,” the research said.

There is a growing body of evidence logging the health hazards of living close to extraction and end-use facilities, like power plants and oil and gas wells, primarily due to the risk of air pollution emissions.

Air pollution alone causes 7–8 million premature deaths annually, largely from chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, lung cancer, and respiratory infections such as pneumonia, the World Health Organisation warned last year. It also increases the risk of asthma, diabetes, neurological disorders, stillbirth and other pregnancy complications.

Children in particular are vulnerable to the health impacts of air pollution, which can hinder lung and brain development and raise the risk of diseases later in life, the WHO said.

Mid-supply chain infrastructure

However, much less is known about the health effects of living near mid-supply chain infrastructure like storage facilities, the Boston study pointed out, adding that harmful pollutants including volatile organic compounds have been detected near some of these facilities.

More than 6 million people in the U.S. live near storage facilities, including peak shaving facilities, underground gas storage facilities, and petroleum product terminals, the research shows.

“The study really shows that there are big knowledge gaps across the supply chain, in terms of the hazards people are being exposed to, the consequent health impacts, and who is being exposed,” said Jonathan Buonocore, the study lead and assistant professor of environmental health at Boston University’s Institute for Global Sustainability (IGS), in a press release.

“With a lot of these different types of infrastructure, the hazards have not been fully characterized. Characterizing hazards and understanding who is most heavily exposed should be the first steps of understanding the possible health impacts. This research takes the first steps down that path,” he added. “Especially for these more obscure pieces of energy infrastructure, this is the first step to tracking what emissions and stressors those are imposing on the communities.”

Mary Willis, assistant professor of epidemiology at IGS said that “we’re really the first group thinking about this as an integrated system.”

“By quantifying all of these factors at once, we’re potentially able to, down the line, directly compare: what are the health effects of living near an extraction site, compared to living near a storage site? Having that in one database is the first step to doing any health studies in the future on this integrated system,” she added.

(Writing by Sophie Davies)