About This Project

Oil and gas exploration in shale areas, known as fracking, has led to large increases in hydrocarbon air toxics emissions in typically rural landscapes with little to no air quality monitoring. We plan to work with outreach personnel from an environmental NGO to supply volunteers in selected areas with passive sampling cartridges to monitor weekly average exposure to selected hydrocarbon air toxics. Samples are analyzed using gas chromatography, and data is provided weekly and shared broadly.

Ask the Scientists

What is the context of this research?

Air pollution in shale areas is poorly researched. Emissions, including air toxics, from oil and gas production sites are comparatively small, but there are literally hundreds of pads in many counties, often surrounding private properties. Thus, air pollutants carried from these sites by the wind can impact people from many directions 24/7, and numerous cases of nuisance odors and related sicknesses have been reported for many years now in various shale areas. However, since exposures are generally low, and often intermittent, short-term air quality monitoring by state officials usually does not reveal a (legal) problem.

What is the significance of this project?

Our approach to air toxics monitoring is different: Instead of a "grab sample", a short-term air sample providing a snapshot of air quality, or the deployment of sophisticated and expensive air monitoring equipment for long periods, we offer to collect air pollutants passively onto small cartridge samplers. Volunteers in shale areas with nearby oil and/or gas production sites install the samplers on their property, and return them to us on a weekly basis for analysis. We analyze for a series of hydrocarbons, including air toxics such as benzene, and provide a weekly replacement set of samplers.

What are the goals of the project?

By deployment onto people's private property near production (or midstream, aka oil and gas handling) sites, we derive actual mean average exposure to the emitted air toxics where people live.

Our goals are to (i) monitor for at least a year to determine seasonal changes, (ii) determine the conditions under which average weekly exposure is likely largest, and (iii) determine how exposure changes with site proximity, presuming we either deploy multiple samplers at different distances from one site, or extrapolate from measurements at different distances at a variety of sites.