Researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, said their analysis, which was published in the journal One Earth, is the first to examine historical and projected wildfire threats on oil and gas facilities in the US. While the public health effects of scorched and damaged drill sites are unclear, researchers said the study is a necessary step toward understanding the potential compound hazards and could help inform policy about future drilling.
"Most of the oil wells in California are currently in wildfire threatened areas, and a lot of people live in those areas because of the history of oil and gas development in this state," said David J.X. González, an assistant professor of environmental health sciences at UC Berkeley's School of Public Health. "The same issues that have been with us historically are still with us, and it looks like they might lead to new environmental justice issues that haven't really been explored."
González, the paper's first author, pointed to Los Angeles and Kern counties as populated areas plumbed for oil and gas extraction and also at high risk of burning now or in the near future. In the past, fires in oil and gas fields not related to wildfires have caused blowouts and leaks from gas storage tanks in Los Angeles have resulted in explosions that damaged buildings. Near Bakersfield, dozens of wells have been found to be leaking natural gas, some at explosive levels.
Since 1984, almost 350,000 people across the western US have lived within 1 km of a well that was inside a burn zone, researchers found. Asian, Black, Hispanic, and Native American people have faced disproportionately high exposure to those wells affected primarily by a handful of megafires in California, Texas, and Oklahoma.
Across the West today, nearly 3 million people live within 1 km of a well that is projected to be in an area with an increased risk of burning in the coming decades. What's more, the number of wells in high-risk wildfire areas is predicted to nearly double by the end of the century.
That means more wells are being drilled in more areas expected to burn.
"I don't want to say, 'The sky is falling.' But there was more of an impact than we thought there was going to be," González said. "When we put everything together, it starts to look like this is a problem that hasn't really been looked at in the past but has been worsening and will likely continue to worsen. It's concerning, particularly for people living near leaking wells."
While the confluence of fire and drilling isn't meant to be alarmist, González said it is an example of compounding factors that hold unexplored, and potentially significant, health effects.