The human health hazards of gas leaks are still relatively unknown.
But exactly what pollutants are natural gas appliances spreading around people’s homes? That has been a bit of a mystery. “It’s a really potent climate pollutant because it’s leaking everywhere, and everywhere we look, it seems to be leaking more than we think,” says Drew Michanowicz, a visiting scientist at.
“We just kind of wanted to know what else is in this natural gas considering it is so widely used.” Michanowicz and other researchers from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health recently discovered that unburned natural gas from leaks contains nearly 300 unique chemical compounds—21 of which are federally designated as “hazardous air pollutants.” For the study, which was published today in thethe team surveyed around 70 different kitchen stoves and building pipes in Boston, Massachusetts. What they found was that these samples contained varying amounts of hazardous air pollutants, including benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, xylene, and hexane. The levels varied based on the time of year, with winter typically having the most pollution.The authors further concluded that the average person probably can’t smell every gas leak, especially the small, slow seeps. Natural gas is naturally odorless, so to help warn residents of leaks, gas companies often mix in an odorizer likeStill, the researchers found that leaks with up to 10 times the amount of naturally occurring methane inside a building can still be hard to sense. “We don’t have anything [for methane] like a carbon monoxide detector or a smoke detector or sometimes a radon detector. Really, our line of defense for knowing there’s a leak in and around us are those odoring chemicals that they add,” says Michanowicz. What this means for human health is still up in the air—but Michanowicz notes that some of the harmful substances such as benzene are already in people’s homes because of
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