Oil and Gas as Drivers of Climate Change and Health: Developing unique resources to investigate multi-level and diverse effects of exposure to oil and gas wells

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PROJECT SUMMARY / ABSTRACT The oil and gas industry generates half of all global greenhouse gasses. On the ground, local oil and gas production creates myriad exposures that can increase risks of developing asthma and cancer, as well as liver, immune, and neurologic diseases. Millions of California residents live, work, and play near active oil and gas wells because the State does not require any minimum distance between those wells & schools, homes, parks, or workplaces. Exposure to oil & gas wells is complex and dynamic, but few studies include the breadth and depth of data necessary to fully assess contemporary health effects or understand future changes. The California Teachers Study (CTS) is a prospective observational cohort that has followed N=133,477 adult women, almost all of whom live in California, continuously since 1995-1996. We propose to create detailed, individual-level data on CTS participants' exposure to oil and gas wells during CTS follow-up. First, we will use detailed data on all oil and gas wells in California from the California Department of Conservation Geologic Energy Management Division (CalGEM) well statewide tracking system (WellSTAR) and from Enverus, a commercial service that maintains a national database of all oil and gas well drilling, system to identify who was exposed to oil and gas well sites. We will create time-dependent exposure metrics that capture individuals' exposures to active, idle, and capped wells, by time, distance, and production volume, as well as flaring events. Second, we will integrate those exposures with other neighborhood-level measures of socioeconomic status (from the US Census Bureau) and environment burden (from CalEnviroScreen). Third, we will characterize the real-world exposure distribution of oil and gas wells and production over time and across CTS participant subgroups of interest. These summary data and data visualizations will provide the specific and detailed data researchers need to accelerate their planning and future research. We will also conduct a proof- of-concept project by comparing respiratory-related emergency department visit patterns among participants who were exposed vs. unexposed to oil and gas wells. The CTS is an ideal setting in which to generate these novel data that can accelerate research on climate change. All of these data and resources will be openly available to researchers everywhere via the secure, user-friendly, and cloud-based CTS Researcher Platform. These data will enable a broad range of research that can quantify the effects of oil and gas production exposure on numerous disease endpoints; evaluate the potential interactions between these exposures and other aspects of the built and natural environment; and assess the potential impacts of past and future changes in exposure, such as when well production is paused or permanently ended. These data will position the CTS to support a broad range of hypothesis-driven population-sciences research on how oil and gas production affects human health and influences the impact of climate change on human health.