# Estimating acute impacts of unconventional oil and gas development on cause-specific hospitalization via satellite-based exposure assessment

> **NIH NIH K99** · HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH · 2022 · $102,142

## Abstract

Project summary
Onshore expansion of Unconventional oil and gas development (UOGD) is considered an emerging
environmental health issue due to its disproportional proliferation in rural U.S communities and the potential
health impacts on 23 million nearby residents. However, two critical gaps in exposure assessment have
restricted previous studies from achieving rigorous and actionable evidence regarding the acute health effects
of UOGD construction stages. First, current exposure assessments were too coarse to accurately capture the
short-term variability in exposure. Due to a lack of detailed construction records, investigators had to impute
construction timelines for most wells based on questionable assumptions, which likely introduce
misclassification. Second, none of prior large-scale observational studies has quantified exposure to specific
UOGD-sourced pollutant. Investigators instead have developed various surrogates, which proxy residential
exposure with functions of auxiliary factors (e.g., distance to UOGD wells). These exposure surrogates do not
account for the different transports and fates of UOGD-sourced pollutants in ambient environment, thus cannot
indicate specific exposure pathway(s). Furthermore, causal inference, which provide a rigorous adjustment for
confounding, have not been widely used in estimating UOGD’s health effects. The objective of this proposal is
to investigate the acute health effects of UOGD constructions based on improved satellite-based exposure
assessment. In the K99 phase, I will take advantage of high-resolution images obtained by multiple recently
launched satellites, including Sentinel-1s, Sentinel-2s, and Dove satellites to automatically detect the daily
construction stage of UOGD wells (Aim 1). Multiple state-of-art causal inferential methods will be used to
estimate the acute effects of each UOGD construction stage on the risk of cause-specific hospitalization in
Medicare beneficiaries based on the new exposure assessment (Aim 2).In the R00 phase, I will develop and
validate new exposure metrics based on the daily concentrations of air pollutants near UOGD wells, which are
observed by Sentinel 5P (Aim3). Finally, I will explore the extent to which UOGD-related air pollutants mediate
any effect of UOGD construction stages (Aim4). The expected outcomes are 1) an open-source software to
detect UOGD-related activities from remote sensing images; 2) exposure metrics for UOGD-related air
pollutants; 3) acute causal health effects of UOGD construction. The exposure data will be made public
available to advance the field.

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10507465
- **Project number:** 1K99ES034459-01
- **Recipient organization:** HARVARD UNIVERSITY D/B/A HARVARD SCHOOL OF PUBLIC HEALTH
- **Principal Investigator:** Longxiang Li
- **Activity code:** K99 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $102,142
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-09-01 → 2024-08-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10507465

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10507465, Estimating acute impacts of unconventional oil and gas development on cause-specific hospitalization via satellite-based exposure assessment (1K99ES034459-01). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-24 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10507465. Licensed CC0.

---

*[NIH grants dataset](/datasets/nih-grants) · CC0 1.0*