Oil and gas industry Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Oil and gas industry - Essay Example The environment is a crucial component for the survival of living organisms. To that effect, the paper will discuss the impact of the oil and gas industry on the environment. First, the operations in the oil and gas sector lead to water pollution by means of oil spills and by products. Spills can occur both on land and sea. As noted by Taylor (295), there has been evidence of oil spills on the American coastline and adjacent countries. Oil spills in the marine environment kills the aquatic ecosystem. Scholastic and Crane (6) claim that the Deepwater Horizon Spill at the Gulf of Mexico was the worst in U.S History where more than 250,000 barrels of oil spilled into the ocean. It affected a huge population of the marine life. The same applies for land spills. The oil damages the surface vegetation. Spills may take up from months to years to clean up. Second, the petroleum industry is the largest industrial source of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the United States. As cited by Barker (45), these are groups of chemicals that form the ground level ozone. This results in global warming as the ozone reflects the heat from the earth’s warming up the earth because the VOCs lead to the formation of zone. Ozone traps heat in the atmosphere leading to global warming. Third, crude oil contains a mixture of numerous organic compounds that are extremely toxic and cause cancer. The presence of benzene in crude oil results in leukemia in humans. In the same way, the concentration of oil at 4000 parts per million promptly kills the fish (Prasad and Kumari 29). Next, the oil and gas industry pollute the air. The burning of the oil products produces greenhouse as well as other pollutants. Some of the air pollutants include nitrogen dioxide, sulphur dioxide, carbon dioxide, heavy metals, and VOCs. The incomplete burnt compounds results in fine particles of soot that have been found to cause respiratory