Air Quality and Health Impacts of Oil and Gas Emissions in the United States
Abstract
Emissions from oil and gas (O&G) production are an underappreciated contributor to air pollution. U.S. EPA's National Emissions Inventory (NEI) from 2014 indicate that O&G production was the largest anthropogenic source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), and the 6thand 7thhighest anthropogenic emitter of SO2and NOxrespectively. However, limited efforts have examined the contribution of O&G activity on air pollution and associated health impacts. We use the WRF-SMOKE-CMAQ modeling framework to assess the contribution of individual pollutant emissions from this sector at a spatial resolution of 12x12-km in 2016. We then link this to an air pollution health impact assessment model - including population and background disease estimates and epidemiology on the health impacts of air pollution - to estimate spatially explicit health impacts of O&G emissions. We adjusted the NEI-based VOC estimates from O&G to account for underestimates in methane emissions. We used CMAQ v5.2 with the Decoupled-Direct Method (DDM) to track sensitivity of ozone and fine particulate matter (PM2.5) to emissions from O&G, tagging specific combinations of O&G emissions source regions and individual precursors from different activities (production, processing, transportation, storage and compressors) to assess their individual contributions to air pollution in the modeling domain. Our analyses will effectively quantify the air quality and health impacts of O&G emissions since recent updates to CMAQ included formation of secondary organic aerosol (SOA) from VOCs. Preliminary results indicate that the range of impacts of oil and gas emissions on air quality across the nation ranged from -0.01 to 1.6 ug/m3 (-0.01% to 32% of total) of Annual Average PM2.5 and -0.1 to 6.7 ppb (-0.3 to 16%) of ozone, with national average impacts at 0.03 ug/m3 (0.9%) of PM2.5 and 0.3 ppb (0.9%) of ozone.
- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFM.A41D..07A
- Keywords:
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- 0305 Aerosols and particles;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 0345 Pollution: urban and regional;
- ATMOSPHERIC COMPOSITION AND STRUCTURE;
- 3315 Data assimilation;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES;
- 3360 Remote sensing;
- ATMOSPHERIC PROCESSES