PSE Healthy Energy approached us to turn a rich, technical dataset on U.S. refineries into a visually-impactful, map-based tool that a broad audience could actually explore. The goal was to make the connection between a facility’s emissions and the people living nearby legible at a glance, without hiding the science that produced it.

At the core of the tool is air-quality modeling. For each refinery, we processed InMap model outputs into dissolved PM2.5 concentration polygons that show where refinery-linked pollution actually travels. From the national map, viewers can zoom to any individual facility to see its pollution footprint, its estimated health and mortality impacts, and the “sensitive receptors” within range — the schools, hospitals, childcare centers, nursing homes, and prisons closest to it. Local demographics are set against state and national averages, keeping the question of who bears these impacts front and center.

Making that feel effortless took a fair amount of plumbing. We built a data pipeline that converts more than 130 InMap shapefiles into clean, web-ready geometry and stitches in hundreds of thousands of sensitive-receptor locations, then structures everything so the map loads fast while each facility’s full detail is pulled on demand. The result stays responsive across browsers and devices without flattening the modeling underneath it.

The finished microsite gives regulators, researchers, advocates, and nearby residents a shared, credible picture of refinery air pollution and its human toll across the country.