The Growing Oil and Gas Industry Means More Incidents Like East Palestine.
Rebecca Leber | April 2, 2023 | Vox
There’s a common thread linking many of the high-profile chemical spills that have made headlines across the country lately: the oil and gas industry.
Philadelphia residents were on high alert after the Trinseo latex plant 20 miles from the city released at least 8,100 gallons of acrylic polymers into a tributary for the Delaware River on March 24. Those acrylic polymers were made up of compounds known as butyl acrylate, ethyl acrylate, and methyl methacrylate; all are produced from fossil fuels.
Last month, East Palestine, Ohio, faced a Norfolk Southern train derailment with highly volatile toxic chemicals, including butyl acrylate and vinyl chloride — which is also derived from oil. On March 28, 10 barges, including one containing 1,400 metric tons of methanol — yup, you guessed it, made from oil or gas — broke loose in the Ohio River in Kentucky.
Many other incidents don’t make national news: The Guardian reported that the US has averaged a chemical accident every two days so far in 2023. Every year, there’s an average of 202 accidental chemical releases at facilities, according to EPA data.
This adds up to a major threat to water quality. “In the US, chemical exposure probably is the biggest threat to water quality, particularly drinking water quality, whether that is direct chemical exposure from facilities like what happened in Philadelphia or chemical exposure from products,” said Joel Tickner, who is a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and leads the nonprofit Green Chemistry & Commerce Council.
All these events are usually lumped together in the vague category of a chemical spill, but it’s important to get more specific than that. Petrochemicals — as this class of compounds are known — are ubiquitous today, used to make some form of the plastic found in detergents, cosmetics, clothing, packaging, and more. (The Trinseo plant near Philadelphia, for instance, was basically making paint.)
There’s a reason plastics and petrochemicals are in nearly everything. They’re dirt cheap — and useful. The industry has become extremely efficient at converting fossil fuels into sets of materials that are lighter in weight and pliable, making them as adaptable for medical equipment as they are for lip balm, nail polish, clothing, and single-use coffee cups.
But the adaptability comes at a cost. These chemicals can conceivably be produced and transported safely — at least on paper. But the volume of accidents shows how often they aren’t. In 2022, according to federal data, there were more than 20,000 recorded times hazardous materials caused injury, accidents, or death while in transit. “It’s a very risky chain every step of the way,” said Judith Enck, a former regional EPA administrator and president of the advocacy group Beyond Plastics.
Those risks aren’t going away anytime soon. Petrochemical production in the US is booming, derived from the larger boom in US oil and gas supply. And the industry’s broadening footprint means more communities are coming in direct contact with carcinogens and endocrine-disruptors that affect humans and animals in ways scientists still don’t fully understand. Most of the time, people aren’t coming into contact with petrochemicals through train derailments, but in more mundane ways.
From fossil fuels to plastics: The full life cycle of petrochemicals takes a dangerous toll
The final form of plastic you buy at the store may be relatively harmless, but the building blocks it’s made up of are often hazardous to human and animal health. “Oil and gas is the basis of most of our chemistry,” Tickner said. “We built most of our modern chemistry on these seven fairly toxic, challenging chemicals and then you essentially iterate off of those.”
Those seven basic chemicals are methanol, ethylene, propylene, butadiene, benzene, toluene, and xylene, and they can pose a variety of risks. Benzene, for instance, is a known carcinogen. Eventually, benzene may be transformed into something as benign as food packaging, but “that plastic that you have bought has a history somewhere else,” Tickner said. The manufacturing “might go back to a community in Louisiana that is highly exposed to benzene or ethylene oxide or some other material.”
