Active Clean Energy Climate, Earth & Environment

Comprehensive health impact assessment of the natural gas supply chain life cycle from production to end use

Funder Wellcome Charity-funded
Associated organisations Boston University · University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Europe PMC affiliations are not treated as award recipients or mapped locations.
Funding £567K
Period Jan 2025 — Jan 2027

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A single year of U.S. natural gas production and use caused 7,500 excess deaths and 410,000 asthma attacks—and those figures only cover part of the supply chain. The problem is that existing health impact assessments stop at the wellhead. They miss the midstream stages—processing, transport, and storage—and the end-use combustion in power plants, buildings, and factories. As the U.S. expands gas production for domestic electricity and export, regulators lack a complete picture of the health toll. This project will model the air quality and health effects of the entire natural gas life cycle, from extraction to the final burn. By filling in the missing midstream and end-use segments, the research will produce the first comprehensive health impact assessment across the full supply chain. If successful, the findings could reshape how energy infrastructure is planned and regulated. Policymakers and grid operators would have concrete, evidence-based numbers on the health costs of gas-fired power generation, pipeline expansions, and industrial combustion—information that currently does not exist.

View original technical description
Our recent health impact assessments (HIAs) using advanced modelling platforms have found that there were 7,500 excess deaths and 410,000 asthma attacks from oil and gas production in the U.S. in 2016, due to emissions from compressor stations, wellsite activities, and flaring. However, these assessments only represent a portion of the methane gas supply chain and exclude impacts from midstream (processing, transportation, and storage) and end-use (combustion for electric power generation, in buildings, and in industry). Understanding these health impacts is crucial as the U.S. is poised to expand methane gas (often called “natural gas”) production and use even further, largely to generate electricity to meet expected increases in demand domestically and for export.Our project aims to apply our state-of-the-science air pollution HIA framework to fill in this evidence gap and evaluate the air quality and health impacts of the remaining elements of the natural gas supply chain. This will include midstream processes and end-use in electricity generation and industry. This proposal, in tandem with our previous work and ongoing research funded by the Wellcome Trust, would offer a novel and comprehensive picture of the air quality and health impacts across the entire natural gas supply chain.

View the original record at the funder ↗

Researchers

Jonathan Buonocore (EPMC Awardee)Sarav Arunachalam (EPMC Awardee)

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Original classification

Discretionary Award

Plain English summaries and category classifications on this site are generated by AI and may not perfectly reflect the original research.