The demographic characteristics of populations living near oil and gas wells in the USA

Proville, Jeremy; Roberts, Katherine A.; Peltz, Adam; Watkins, Lisa; Trask, Elizabeth; Wiersma, Dustin

doi:10.1007/s11111-022-00403-2

Review Article
Published: 17 June 2022

The demographic characteristics of populations living near oil and gas wells in the USA

Jeremy Proville ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-6789-9685¹,
Katherine A. Roberts¹,
Adam Peltz¹,
Lisa Watkins²,
Elizabeth Trask¹ &
Dustin Wiersma³

Population and Environment (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

This study documents the prevalence of historically marginalized populations (across age, income, education, race-ethnicity, and language) living near active oil and gas wells throughout the USA, at both local and aggregated scales. This is performed by way of areal apportionment using well location data and population characteristics from the American Community Survey. A clustering analysis of marginalized populations living near a high density of wells reveals four distinct regions of high prevalence: southern California, southwest Texas, Appalachia, and northwest New Mexico. At the nationwide scale, we find large absolute numbers of people living near wells, including marginalized groups: nearly 18 million people in total across the USA, many of which are Hispanic (3.3 million), Black (1.8 million), Asian (0.7 million), and Native American (0.5 million), live below the poverty line (3 million), older individuals (3 million), or young children (over 1 million). In certain states, this represents a large share of the total population – over 50% in the case of West Virginia and Oklahoma. Estimates are subsequently compared to county-level control groups to assess patterns of disproportionality. Wide variations are found across regions and metrics, underscoring the locally specific nature of these data. Our research contributes to the field of environmental justice by describing the populations living near oil and gas wells.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ricardo Esparza Gamez and Aurora Barone for their excellent research assistance, as well as Rainer Romero-Canyas, Jorge Consuegra, Beia Spiller, Suzi Kerr, Scott Anderson, Elena Craft, David Lyon, Ben Ratner, and Melissa Vargas for their thoughtful comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

Environmental Defense Fund, New York, NY, USA
Jeremy Proville, Katherine A. Roberts, Adam Peltz & Elizabeth Trask
Department of Biological and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, USA
Lisa Watkins
Senior GIS Consultant, Olympia, WA, USA
Dustin Wiersma

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Jeremy Proville
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Katherine A. Roberts
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Adam Peltz
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Lisa Watkins
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Elizabeth Trask
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Dustin Wiersma
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Correspondence to Jeremy Proville.

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Proville, J., Roberts, K.A., Peltz, A. et al. The demographic characteristics of populations living near oil and gas wells in the USA. Popul Environ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00403-2

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Accepted: 09 May 2022
Published: 17 June 2022
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11111-022-00403-2

Keywords

Oil and gas wells
Fossil fuel production
Demographics