Overview

• The Science Advances paper by UCL and the Stockholm Environment Institute is the first to quantify health harms across the entire oil and gas supply chain using 2017 data.
• Researchers attribute 91,000 premature deaths annually to sector pollution, along with 10,350 preterm births, 216,000 childhood asthma cases, and 1,610 lifetime cancers.
• Indigenous and Hispanic populations face higher burdens from upstream and midstream emissions, while Black and Asian populations are most affected by downstream and end‑use exposures, with severe outcomes near refineries in eastern Texas and southern Louisiana.
• End‑use combustion overwhelmingly drives the sector’s health toll, accounting for about 96% of incidents linked to oil and gas.
• The largest absolute impacts occur in California, Texas, New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and authors say the 2017‑based estimates likely undercount today’s burden given roughly 40% growth in production since then.