Predictive, Source-Oriented Modeling and Measurements to Evaluate Community Exposures to Air Pollutants and Noise from Unconventional Oil and Gas Development

This report, available for downloading below, presents a study led by Lea Hildebrandt Ruiz at The University of Texas at Austin. Hildebrandt Ruiz and colleagues examined population exposures to air emissions and noise in a major US oil and gas region and developed a model for use in multiple regions to predict population exposures and assess the effectiveness of interventions intended to mitigate emissions to the air.

Key takeaways:

• ​​​​​The study includes extensive monitoring and modeling across three oil and gas regions in the United States: Eagle Ford Shale, Permian Basin, and Marcellus Shale.
• The investigators developed a model (the TRACER model) to assess exposures to air pollution from oil and gas development and inform future health studies. The model included additional sources of emissions, regional-scale modeling, a broad suite of pollutants, and evaluation for the purpose of exposure assessment in future health studies.
• Ethane concentrations were affected by oil and gas development emission sources up to 50 km away in modeling. The study reported typically high correlations between ethane and other volatile organic compounds from different exposure models and with direct observations. CALPUFF appeared to be the best-performing model in reducing bias for ethane.