Map Shows States Where Toxic Air Pollution Has Been Detected

Data collected by PSE Healthy Energy, an independent energy and climate research institute, shows where methane emissions have hit particularly high levels over the years across the country.

The states with some of the highest reported incidents of methane emissions included Texas, New Mexico, Utah and California.

PSE Healthy Energy cited oil and gas infrastructure as the cause of the high releases of methane and other pollutants—such as benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene and hexane—in these areas.

“These pollutants can pose serious risks to the respiratory, reproductive, and nervous systems,” the institute said.

Newsweek has contacted PSE Healthy Energy for comment via email.

Why It Matters

The findings highlight growing concern about air pollution and quality—particularly in these affected states that have a lot of oil and gas infrastructure.

“Methane is generally a global health issue as it is a long-lived gas and so spreads over the whole planet and leads to an increased amount of ozone at the surface,” Drew Shindell, a professor of earth sciences at Duke University, told Newsweek.

“Every million tons of methane will kill about 1,000 to 3,000 people from ozone-induced diseases worldwide,” he said.

What To Know

The institute said it took measurements from “actual methane emissions events.” It then “modeled the concentrations of hazardous air pollutants that were emitted during those events and illustrated where concentrations may have put public health at risk.”

Texas and New Mexico both had the highest number of recorded events, with hundreds of incidents detected in both states.

Comparatively, the other affected states each had either single- or double-digit numbers of incidents.

Explaining why methane emissions were particularly high in Texas, New Mexico, Utah and California, Daniel Jacob, a professor of atmospheric chemistry and environmental engineering at Harvard University, told Newsweek that these states were among “the largest oil and gas producing states, and most large leaks are from production and transmission infrastructure.”

“Landfills in California have also been observed to have large emissions in a few cases, so that’s probably playing a role there alongside oil and gas, but in the other three it’s likely almost completely oil and gas,” Shindell said.

Jacob said that what typically caused methane leaks included “equipment failure, deliberate venting during equipment maintenance, and unlit flares.”

“Flares are the flames that set the emitted methane on fire, like a pilot light in a furnace,” Shindell said.

He said flares “are often unlit or poorly adjusted and so all or lots of the methane is emitted to the atmosphere.” He added that was “not supposed to happen.”

Another cause is that compressors, used to “push the methane—the main component of natural gas—into pipelines,” can “leak a lot out” in the compression process, Shindell said.

Also, when a new well is dug, whether that be oil or gas, “there is typically a very high pressure initial volume of hydrocarbons that’s too powerful for the capture systems and so companies are generally allowed to release the methane on initial drilling,” he added.

It is also important to know that it is not only methane that is a real concern, Jacob added, but the aromatic hydrocarbons—such as benzene and toluene—that are “co-emitted with methane.”

“By observing methane, which is easy to do, we can deduce the concentrations of these aromatic hydrocarbons,” he said.

Trying to determine the effects of these leaks on local populations is difficult, Shindell said, as “the quantity and mixture of larger hydrocarbons varies substantially from place to place.”

Although, emissions from burning methane plumes and oil and gas infrastructure, which produce nitrogen oxides and particulates, “have clear adverse health impacts,” he said.

Shindell added, “Exposures to elevated levels of those pollutants lead to exacerbated asthma and other respiratory diseases and increase risk of cardiovascular diseases as well.”

What People Are Saying

Drew Shindell, a professor of earth sciences at Duke University, told Newsweek: “The key is that there are dozens of places along the chain—from well to end use for gas—where there can be leaks, and methane is invisible (without special infrared cameras), so it’s easy to ignore (deliberately or inadvertently). And there are economic reasons to release methane from oil operations—to make more money drilling for more oil rather than to still make money, but less, capturing and using the gas found alongside the oil.”

He added: “Estimates are that U.S. oil and gas sector emissions of these pollutants kill around 7,000 people prematurely each year and exacerbate hundreds of thousands of asthma cases. Exposure even for just a few days to high levels of these pollutants is linked to adverse health impacts, with chronic exposures being even more dangerous—and living near a leaky facility would often cause chronic exposures.”