* This two-part series about the oil and gas industry and air quality in the Unita Basin is made possible by the Utah State University College of Arts & Sciences, Journalism and Communication department.
Oil and gas production in the Uinta Basin has led to increasing concerns about air quality in the region. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency in 2024 ruled Utah failed to meet the requirements to clean up the air in the Basin.
Just off Highway 191 in Indian Canyon between Price and Duchesne, massive pump jacks swing slowly back and forth, sucking crude oil and natural gas from mineral deposits deep in the earth.
Oil and gas are the economic lifeblood of the communities out here. But oil and gas production release pollution into the atmosphere, and recent changes to national air quality standards are the source of major uncertainty for the industry going forward.
The Uinta Basin is a major oil and gas producer, and it has a unique air pollution problem. KarLee Zager is an undergraduate student at Utah State University's Vernal campus, where she is studying air pollution and atmospheric chemistry.
“The Uinta Basin has a really unique topography, and we're essentially in a little bowl, and in the winter, we are prone to inversions, because we get cold air that gets almost trapped under a layer of warm air, and what happens is any pollutants that we release in that cold air layer hangs out around with us,” said Zager.
The inversion Zager is talking about is a fixture in the region during the winter. As Seth Lyman, climate scientist and director of the USU Bingham Research Center in Vernal said, the inversion can trap many chemicals produced by the oil and gas industry, which leads to unhealthy air quality.
“It's chemistry that is the reason that oil and gas matters so much in the winter, and why we have wintertime ozone … it's not emitted directly. It's organic compounds, or VOCs, volatile organic compounds and NOx are emitted then they react in the air to make ozone,” said Lyman.
The volatile organic compounds and nitrous oxide, or NOx, that Lyman refers to are primarily released into the atmosphere by oil and gas infrastructure.
“So where do they come from? Well natural gas is organic and volatile organic compounds, right? So any leak, any emission, any spill, some are not always unintentional," Lyman explained. "Some industry processes require some releases to the atmosphere."
Whereas the ozone in other places is often caused by factories, buildings, or large numbers of vehicles on the road, Lyman said it’s the oil and gas industry that dominates the production of chemicals leading to ozone formation.
“So that's really why it's oil and gas driven. That's the industry, that's the pollution that exists here, because there's not a lot. There's just not enough cars and trucks or other industries to have enough pollution," said Lyman.
High ozone levels are unhealthy. They can aggravate respiratory health conditions like asthma and bronchitis and cause coughing, chest tightness, and inflammation. For many people in the Basin, living with these ozone levels presents a continual health challenge.
“When you talk to people out here, like, basically everybody has an inhaler," said Tristan Cox.
Cox is a high school student in Vernal and a student researcher with the Bingham Research Center. UPR joined him and Zager in the oil fields to set up an atmospheric monitoring station. Cox said that many of the students in his school struggle with the wintertime air quality.
“In my like, one of the PE classes I peer tutor for, there's probably 10 of the 24 students who have inhalers. So it's quite a lot," said Cox.
It gets especially bad in the wintertime.
"It's like doing intense activity outside, like you'll feel it like, you'll feel raspiness in your throat,” said Cox.
The unhealthy effects of ozone at high concentrations have led the EPA to impose ozone level regulations. The current rule establishes the acceptable level of ozone at 70 parts per billion (ppb).
Seventy parts out of one billion is a tiny amount of ozone, which goes to show how hazardous this chemical really is. Of the 13,000 gallons of water that you will drink in your lifetime, slightly less than 1 teaspoon of that is 70 ppb. By comparison, anything over 200 ppb of cyanide is considered unsafe in drinking water.
When this EPA rule was created back in 2015, ozone levels in the Basin were too high.
“So in 2018 was the first time we were designated as a non attainment area for ozone marginal. So it's the lowest classification based upon the numbers we saw that were just right around 80 parts per billion,” said Sheila Vance, an environmental scientist with the Utah Division of Air Quality.
Vance said after the EPA penalized Utah for high ozone in 2018, regulators and the fossil fuel industry were given a few years to meet the standard, or stricter requirements would be imposed.
For a while, things in the Basin improved and it looked like the region might meet EPA standards. But 2023 was a bad year for ozone. Though Utah industry and government officials requested additional time to clean up the air, the EPA decided in 2024 that the Basin would be upgraded to an even stricter non-compliance status.
Under this stricter rule, oil and gas industry facilities that produce pollution will need to implement control technologies that reduce emissions. The Basin will have to prove that volatile organic compounds are consistently declining.
Local officials in Utah have filed a request with the EPA to reconsider their most recent decision. With a new presidential administration, leadership in the EPA has changed. The new EPA administrator, Lee Zeldin, has very explicitly stated that he supports deregulation and increasing energy production in the US. Still, it’s still too early to tell if the EPA decision will change and how that might affect Utahns.
As a student of environmental and atmospheric sciences with many connections to oil and gas workers in the Uinta Basin where she grew up, Vance said it’s a tricky subject to navigate.
“Ultimately, we all want the same thing, right? We don't want our kids breathing bad air. We don't want our kids drinking bad water… I think I wish that we could go about things more in a collaborative way, and that people that worked in the industry didn't necessarily see us as a threat to their livelihood, and we don't see them as hostile, right? Because there's just kind of this dynamic when you go into things that have to be overcome, and you realize that you can work together, maybe for different goals, but achieve the same outcome that's better for everybody,” said Vance.
Read part two of this series here: Despite ozone reductions, Uinta Basin air polluters still have work to do
