The oil and gas industry is the primary source of pollutants that cause ozone formation in the Uinta Basin.
Brian Moench is the board president of Utah Physicians for a Healthy Environment, a nonprofit group dedicated to protecting public health. He told UPR that ozone is extremely hazardous for humans to breathe.
“If you inhale ozone acutely, it chemically, biologically acts like sun, burning the lining of the lungs — well, in addition to the lungs — that creates an inflammatory response in the body from the immune system that then creates a cascade of the production of inflammatory chemicals," Moench said. "And those inflammatory chemicals can then wreak some biological havoc on organs far removed from the lungs … that has systemic implications that can affect virtually all critical organs.”
In 2024, the Environmental Protection Agency imposed strict regulations on the Uinta Basin, since the region wasn’t meeting national air quality standards. That decision was made under President Joe Biden. But since the Donald Trump administration assumed control of the EPA, state authorities in Utah have filed a request with the administration to reverse the decision.
Recent rhetoric from Lee Zeldin, the new EPA administrator, suggests the administration is sympathetic to the state and industry’s request.
Jeremy Nichols is a senior advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity.
“All indications are EPA is just going to completely undo everything officially and put us right back where we were before the previous EPA made this decision, and unfortunately, leave the region with less protections, less clean air safeguards, less certainty that the air pollution will be cleaned up than ever before," Nichols said.
If the EPA reverses course, it would ignite considerable controversy, largely due to differences in the interpretation of some simple data.
For their part, oil and gas industry officials say the original decision to tighten regulations on the region was misguided. That's because, according to Rikki Hrenko-Browning, president of the Utah Petroleum Association, recent voluntary measures taken by the industry have led to improvements in air quality standards.
“Air quality in the Uinta Basin has steadily improved over the past decade, with current ozone levels at or near EPA’s standard and 25% lower than in 2013, despite a doubling of oil production and significant growth in natural gas production," Hrenko-Browning said.
Ozone has in fact decreased from above 100 ppb in 2013 to around 75 ppb in 2024. According to Seth Lyman, director of the USU Bingham Research Institute in Vernal, the industry has adopted many positive steps to both reduce emissions from their equipment and monitor production facilities to determine when and where emissions are taking place.
Still, Hrenko-Browning’s data shows that while ozone levels have hovered in the 75 ppb range for several years now, in only one year since 2020 have ozone levels in the Uinta Basin met the EPA standards and dipped below 70.
For Jeremy Nichols, that’s not enough.
“So that’s like my teenage son saying that he’s been studying harder so he’s doing great, even though his grades are still bad," he said. "The fact is that monitoring data in the Uinta Basin still shows that air quality is failing to meet health-based air quality standards. So awesome. I love that my son is studying, but he’s still failing classes — OK, study more, but you’re not succeeding.”
The Uinta Basin’s natural environmental conditions complicate steps to reduce ozone. Inversions allow air pollution to settle in the wintertime and sunlight reflecting off snow produces high ozone concentrations. Higher snowpack leads to higher ozone, as it did in 2023, according to Hrenko-Browning.
“When the basin experiences a winter like the winter of 2023, one of the two highest snowfall years on record in the basin of the last 50 years, it’s impossible to say how much emission reduction would be needed to overcome these unusual and natural occurences," she said.
Nichols said the natural conditions of the region are no excuse for not adequately curtailing pollution.
“That’s the frustrating thing. They act like the sky is falling, that if we protect clean air they’ll somehow go out of business. Well one, if you have a business model that’s based on poisoning the air people breathe, I think you’ve got a bad business model. We have to do a double take there," he said. "But then, fundamentally, it’s like, really, like, you can’t do this little more? You’re spending millions of dollars a year on environmental compliance. What’s a few more thousands really? You’re really these big oil and gas companies that are making record profits, you can’t afford to do more to protect air quality?”
Moench said even small amounts of remaining pollution can be harmful.
“I'll give you one example. It helps illustrate the point: smoking one cigarette a day is virtually half as much risk as smoking an entire pack. So that illustrates one, there's no safe number of cigarettes you can smoke, and the impact of each cigarette is actually greater for the first few cigarettes than it is for the last few cigarettes," he said.
Moench said the same principle applies to air pollution in the atmosphere.
“When the background levels of pollution are very low, small increments in pollution have more of an impact in that setting than the same increments would have if the background levels were very high," he explained. "Even small decreases in air pollution can have significant public health benefits."
The dirtiest air is the cheapest to begin cleaning up. As the air gets cleaner and cleaner, Hrenko-Browning said it’s more difficult and expensive to remove the last little bit.
“Voluntary measures by the oil and gas industry have certainly reduced the amount of ozone precursor emissions, and therefore the amount of ozone formed in the Uinta Basin," she said. "It would require an intensive, lengthy, and costly computer modeling study to even start to understand what controls, and how much more investment would reduce ozone even more in the Uinta Basin.”
The oil and gas industry has made progress in cleaning up the air but levels are still at or near the EPA limit. Nichols said it’s not about high, medium or low levels — the standard is 70 ppb and over a three-year period, monitoring data showed ozone levels were above that threshold.
"This is a math problem. We’re not talking English here, or, you know, political science. This is just straight up math. And so, because the numbers don’t lie, we feel like there’s a lot going for us in terms of enforcing the law and holding the EPA accountable," he said.
The U.S. Supreme Court recently removed a major roadblock to the construction of a railway that would transport crude oil from the Uinta Basin to refineries on the Gulf Coast. Early estimates project this could quadruple oil production in the region.
With this sort of growth, how might air quality be affected? It’s important to consider that oil and gas production doesn’t necessarily mean bad air quality. As production has doubled in the last decade, ozone levels have decreased to the point of near compliance with the National Air Quality Standards.
But the industry is not over the line yet. Strict EPA enforcement seems unlikely under the current administration. In that case, it may come down to legal battles between industry, government, and environmental advocacy groups like the Center for Biological Diversity to determine the future of air quality in the Uinta Basin.
Read part one of this series here: A change in EPA leadership might let Uinta Basin polluters off the hook
