Ozone in the Uinta Basin
UPHE’s president and cofounder was recently on Utah Public Radio (UPR), chiming in on the Uinta Basin’s ozone problem.
The Uinta Basin, in eastern Utah, hasn’t met federal air quality standards for ozone in years. Oil and gas companies say they’re making efforts to reduce emissions, but the air still doesn’t meet EPA standards. Oil and gas companies in the area are also actively and aggressively pursuing increasing extraction through projects like the Uinta Basin Railway and the Wildcat Loadout.
“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 on UPR. “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.”
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.”