All around us, energy infrastructure exists: lighting our streets, heating our homes and workplaces, the fuel that runs our cities and towns.
Much of the infrastructure goes unnoticed, invisible to the untrained eye. Gasoline storage tanks buried underground. Buzzing power plants. Petroleum terminals dotting the Port of Boston.
Those facilities are now mapped out on a new Boston University database that shows fossil fuel facilities across the United States, a first-of-its-kind tool that yields information about which communities bear the brunt of sites like oil wells, natural gas processing, and storage facilities.
“There’s a rapidly growing body of evidence on health impacts of folks living near oil and gas production wells,” said Jonathan Buonocore, an assistant professor of environmental health at the School of Public Health and one of the two lead researchers.
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But there’s less robust research on the health impacts of other fossil-fuel infrastructure like storage facilities, as the field is still relatively new. So Buonocore and Mary Willis, an assistant professor of epidemiology, sought to change that and spent a year piecing together private and public databases to locate every bit of infrastructure that’s needed to get fossil fuels delivered to consumers.
“Turns out there’s about 30 different pieces in between,” Willis said.
The researchers found that neighborhoods labeled as environmental justice communities had a density of energy-emitting infrastructure three times greater than other communities nationally.
Environmental justice communities include minority groups, people who speak another language besides English, and low-income populations who have been historically disadvantaged by past environmental issues. In Greater Boston, that includes parts of Chelsea, Somerville, and East Boston.
The researchers also found that storage infrastructure in the United States was eight times more likely to be located in areas where the majority of residents are non-white.
That’s probably because “these are areas where just cost of living is lower,” Buonocore said. “So this is where disadvantaged communities end up moving to or... it’s just that that’s the place where things get sited.”
The health impacts of fossil fuels are hard to definitively quantify; while researchers have studied the relationship of fossil fuels and air quality, it’s challenging to directly link that to the impact on people’s health.
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However in 2019, Boston College developed a map calculating air pollution for each town in Massachusetts. In Boston, researchers estimate that particulate matter created by the burning of fossil fuels led to an estimated 1,840 asthma cases among children and nearly 300 combined deaths due to cancer and heart disease.
At a local level, communities have pushed back on the concentration of fossil-fuel infrastructure.
John Walkey with Greenroots, an environmental justice organization based in Chelsea, points to the now-decommissioned Mystic Generating Station in Everett, which was the largest fossil-fuel power plant in New England.
“We, for years, have done a lot of work on air quality, and we have very high asthma rates,” Walkey said about the Chelsea and East Boston neighborhoods.
Although the plant is no longer active, its 70 acres are still adjacent to local neighborhoods.
Chelsea residents have also pushed back against such energy facilities, pointing out that they take away open space and expose residents to greater health risks, ones that wealthier communities don’t have to face.
In May, the Conservation Law Foundation sued the company that manages two oil terminals in Chelsea, alleging they violated the Clean Water Act.
“There’s so much work to be done,” said Zeyneb Magavi, executive director of HEET, a nonprofit dedicated to clean-energy transition, who was not involved with the research. But this kind of fossil-fuel mapping is “laying the groundwork,” she said.
Buonocore and Willis hope state and federal officials, nonprofits, and other academics will use this new tool in novel ways to take the research even further.
This story was produced by the Globe’s Money, Power, Inequality team, which covers the racial wealth gap in Greater Boston. You can sign up for the newsletter here.
Esmy Jimenez can be reached at esmy.jimenez@globe.com. Follow her @esmyjimenez.