Natural Gas Pipelines & Environmental Justice

Fossil fuel pipelines crisscross the United States, carrying oil and gas to nearly every part of the country. In 2020, Ryan was invited to attend a zoom meeting where an energy company executive told tribal leaders that his company’s pipelines did not pose an environmental justice concern because they did not disproportionately impact vulnerable communities - their pipelines impacted everyone equally! Ryan interpreted the statement as a testable hypothesis, and he partnered with a group of social scientists to conduct a geospatial analysis of natural gas gathering and transmission pipelines.

The group combined county-level data on social vulnerability and pipeline locations throughout the United States, and they found that while pipelines do not cross every part of the US, the existing network in more densely packed in areas where social vulnerability is high. This means that natural gas pipelines in the US are concentrated in communities that have the least capacity to deal with the risks of hosting this infrastructure (e.g., leaks, explosions, chronic pollution).

In 2021, the group published their study in GeoHealth, where it made the cover of the journal. The study was covered by National Geographic and other major news outlets. It has also been cited in updated federal regulations around pipeline safety reporting. The American Geophysical Union featured the study in an Eos article about community-engaged science.

In the article, the group raised the possibility that the results (and possibly other kinds of socioeconomic disparities) represented an emergent property of a complex system made up of laws, regulations, and professional practices. Ryan later worked with one of the study’s co-authors, Dr. Martina Caretta, to examine one of these professional practices in detail: the process of deciding which studies to cite in environmental impact statements.

In a separate study of property value impacts associated with natural gas pipelines, Martina and Ryan found that pipeline environmental impact statements preferentially and uncritically cite industry-supported, non-peer reviewed reports when discussing pipeline effects on property values. Independent, peer reviewed literature on property value impacts certainly exists, but environmental impact statements cite this literature much less frequently than industry-supported non-peer reviewed literature. When it is cited, the peer reviewed conclusions are typically criticized and dismissed. Martina and Ryan published their study in 2023 in The Extractive Industries and Society.