Oil Facilities in Philadelphia are Poisoning Community Health
Pennsylvania has had a long history of oil processing. At the start of petroleum production, in the mid 19th century, Pennsylvania was a leader in oil drillling and refinery construction. Now, environmental justice movements are drawing attention to the health effects caused by air pollution emitted by refineries. I was driven to research the relationship between community health and oil facilities by the New York Times article, “Pollution is Killing Black Americans. This Community Fought Back” , by Linda Villarose, and its discussion of a movement in Grays Ferry, Philadelphia, that arose from community pushback to the Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery. The company shut down this refinery in June, 2019 after a major fire and series of explosions. Before this malfunction, the refinery processed about 14 million gallons of oil every day while regularly being out of compliance with legal air pollution restrictions. One example is the refinery’s emission of benzene, a chemical labeled as carcinogenic by the Department of Health and Human Services. The benzene emitted by Philadelphia Energy Solutions was found to be 21 times the federal limit. Information of this violation was reported to the city of Philadelphia, but withheld from the local communities. Additionally, before the fire, the refinery had been out of compliance with the Clean Air Act for three quarters of 2019. Between the years of 2014 and 2019, the refinery had been charged over $600,000 for consistent pollution violations.
Another major oil facility in Philadelphia is the Kinder Morgan Terminal on Delaware Ave. This oil transportation site is Northeast of Philadelphia Energy Solutions, along the Delaware River. The terminal has 35 acres of storage tanks for liquid oil, which is transported from the terminal to New York City and New Jersey. Kinder Morgan, like Philadelphia Energy Solutions, has been fined for pollution violations. In June, 2015, the terminal spilled 8,000 gallons of ethanol into the Delaware river, and was fined $570,000. While groundwater pollution is also a necessary public health concern to research and publicize, the focus of this particular report is on air pollution. Of air pollution, the EPA states, “Air emissions can come from a number of sources within a petroleum refinery including: equipment leaks (from valves or other devices); high-temperature combustion processes in the actual burning of fuels for electricity generation; the heating of steam and process fluids; and the transfer of products. ” Between the Kinder Morgan Terminal and the Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery, leaks, fuel combustion, fluid processing, and oil transfer are all factors of exposure to air pollution in Philadelphia.
The purpose of this project is to explore the spatial relationships between the Philadelphia Energy Solutions oil refinery and the Kinder Morgan Terminal, and the communities that are affected by their air pollution. To measure the air pollution and health of communities, I used shapefiles of air monitoring stations and cancer mortality rates by planning districts. Additionally, I highlighted the districts with an above-average percentage of the population living in poverty in order to see what socio-economic groups were located closest to the refineries. Before mapping these attributes, I hypothesized that the closer the planning district to the refinery or the terminal, the higher the cancer mortality rate would be, and the higher the presence of particulate matter. This also made me wonder, would this map show a significant correlation between particulate matter and cancer mortality?
The air monitoring station shapefile was produced by the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, and shows detection data of air pollutants such as particulate matter, sulfur dioxide, carbonyl, and black carbon. I only focused on the detection of particulate matter because it is known to be emitted from oil facilities, and could therefore be an indicator of Philadelphia Energy Solutions or Kinder Morgan Terminal’s effect on air quality. Particulate matter is known to have adverse respiratory effects, like lung disease and asthma. Both prevalent in Grays Ferry. To make a layer showing the location of stations that detect particulate matter, I selected by attribute the air monitoring stations that detected particulate matter, created a new data layer, and symbolized the stations to appear as orange dots. These orange dots could signify areas that are more prone to respiratory health issues because of their exposure to particulate matter. To determine whether or not there was a correlation between presence of particulate matter and cancer, I created an Excel spreadsheet with the names of Philadelphia planning districts and their relative cancer mortality rates. After importing a shapefile of the outlines of the planning districts into the map, I also imported the excel sheet, and used an attribute join of the planning district name.
Analyzing this map, there is little correlation between presence of particulate matter and cancer mortality rates. Surprisingly, there is also less correlation between proximity of particulate matter detection and the oil facilities than I had thought there might be. As shown in the maps below, the three air monitoring stations closest to the Kind Morgan Terminal, which I found using a 4 mile buffer, do detect particulate matter. By contrast, three out of the four air monitoring stations within a distance of four miles from Philadelphia Energy Solutions Refinery did not detect particulate matter.
To determine why this might be, I researched the metadata of these stations. The OpenDataPhilly site, the city advertises that air quality data collected by the Philadelphia Department of Public Health is updated yearly. However, with further examination it can be found that this data was actually last updated only in 2015. While this takes into account the numerous spills at Kinder Morgan Terminal, but it does not take into account the particulate matter that may have been emitted from the combustion of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions fire in 2019. In 2014, a year before the data was last updated, the EPA stated of the Delaware Avenue branch of Kinder Morgan Terminal in Philadelphia, “Although historically there have been several product spills at the facility, the most recent occurring on April 3, 2012, when approximately 100 gallons of fuel-grade ethanol was released due to a check-valve failure on a thermal expansion line in Storage Area A-2 near Tanks 209 and 213.” The detection of particulate matter near the Kinder Morgan Terminal soon after a major spill is consistent with the fact that air pollution can be caused by oil leaks. There was a significantly higher detection of particulate matter at stations close to the terminal than stations close to the refinery in 2015. This points to the possibility that, at least previous to the 2019 Philadelphia Energy Solutions Fire, the malfunctions of the Kinder Morgan Terminal were more detrimental to air quality than the running of Philadelphia Energy Solutions.
While particulate matter is tied to more general negative health effects, particularly respiratory, the chemical benzene is carcinogenic, also emitted by oil facilities, and specifically a concern of communities surrounding Philadelphia Energy Solutions. My hypothesis that the planning districts closest to the refinery would have the highest rates of cancer was generally true. Although there was no cancer mortality data for the district where the refinery was located, likely because the refinery takes up most of the land and leaves little residential area, all of the surrounding districts show high rates. Similarly, the districts just north of the Kinder Morgan Terminal share relatively high rates, while the district of the terminal itself has one of the highest rates in the city.
Because the scope of the city of Philadelphia is too small to see consistent correlation, I decided to widen the geographic lens to analyze the cancer mortality rates of Pennsylvania as a whole. On the map below, generated by the National Cancer Institute, a clearer relationship between the rates and refineries is shown. Philadelphia county has one of the highest rates in the state, being between 176-195 people out of 100,000 people. Philadelphia is home to one of the major past and current refineries of the state, whereas the counties surrounding it have not had refineries, and also have some of the lowest cancer mortality rates in the state: between 125-156 people per 100,000 people. Although this is the lowest bracket of measurement for Pennsylvania, it matches with the national average cancer mortality rate of the United States of 155 people per 100,000 people. The average for all of Pennsylvania is 163 people per 100,000 people. Philadelphia is a county that has some of the highest cancer mortality rates in a state with a cancer mortality rate above the national average.
My last question was: what socio-economic demographics would be most affected by the highest cancer mortality rates? To determine the demographics I created an Excel sheet of the percentages of residents in each planning district living in poverty. I then imported this sheet into the map, and attribute joined with the panning district shapefile. I found the average percentage living in poverty to be 25.8% between all of the districts. After the table was joined to the shapefile, I selected the districts with percentages above 25.8, and created a new layer with this data. I then used symbology to outline the districts in this layer red. This final map shows the cancer mortality rates of each planning district, the detection of particulate matter at each air monitoring station, the planning districts with the highest percentage of residents living in poverty, and the locations of the oil facilities in Philadelphia. I found that my prediction that the districts with the highest percentages living in poverty would also have the highest cancer mortality rates was the general trend of the map. 4 out of the 5 planning districts with the highest cancer mortality rates were also the districts with some of the highest percentage living in poverty. However, one district with high rates of poverty had one of the lowest rates of cancer mortality. This could be because of its comparatively far distance from either oil facility compared to the other impoverished districts. It is also noticeable that most of the air monitoring station data was collected outside of the more impoverished districts, which contributes to the inability to detect correlation between presence of particulate matter and cancer mortality rates or percentage of residents living in poverty. The fact that wealther districts hold almost double the amount of air quality monitoring stations is significant, and should be noted as selective attention to community health on the part of the city government.
I mapped the detection of particulate matter, cancer mortality rates, high percentages living in poverty, and the proximity of these attributes to oil facilities in South Philadelphia in order to find possible correlations. However, I realized that at such a small scope as planning districts in a city, conclusions are difficult to draw. Going forward, analyzing this data either by district in other cities in Pennsylvania, or in Pennsylvania as a whole would make strong correlations more apparent. Additionally, it would be interesting to include a map of racial data in the area to determine if certain racial demographics are disproportionately affected, along with the socio-economic demographics.
Because this data was collected before the 2019 Philadelphia Energy Solutions Fire, it is important to consider the possible differences in air pollution and health afftects since the refinery shut down. On the one hand, such extreme fuel combustion would likely produce a suddenly high concentration of particulate matter. On the other, the fire caused the shut down of a factory that had for years been polluting Philadelphia with high levels of benzene. As time passes since the fire, there is hope that the shutdown of the factory will start to lower levels of benzene in the surrounding areas, and therefore cancer mortality rates in the area, given the strong correlation between high cancer mortality rates and proximity to oil facilities, as well as the knowledge that benzene is a cancer-causing chemical. Nevertheless, the data shows that while both facilities were running, more particulate matter was found near the Kinder Morgan Terminal, so air polllution due to oil processing will persist in Philadelphia despite the end of the Philadelphia Energy Solutions branch.
Air pollution data should be publicized, updated, and easily accessible. Communities must know the dangers of living near oil facilities, but the city will never be the one to willingly tell them, due to economic dependence on oil. Pennsylvania has long been reliant on oil, and environmental justice is bad for business. Even though the city publishes air monitoring station data, it is apparent when comparing the geographic locations of the stations to geographic socio-economic data that wealthier districts are prioritized, not to mention that the city fails to keep even this selective data updated. Despite the shortcomings in transparency, the effects of pollution are glaringly visible, and residents have been drawing attention to the issue in a fight for their own health. Oil production and fossil fuel burning is unsustainable for the future of the planet, and in the meantime is poisoning the health of entire communities.
