The costs of avoiding environmental impacts from shale‐gas surface infrastructure

Milt, Austin; Gagnolet, Tamara; Armsworth, Paul R.

doi:10.1111/cobi.12766

Cited by 12 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 28 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Despite recent advances linking development impacts and spatial conservation prioritization (Bunton et al. ; Milt, Gagnolet, & Armsworth, ; Whitehead et al., ), important landscape‐scale effects of infrastructure caused by diffusion of impacts from the direct footprint are generally poorly known and therefore ignored. We address this gap by combining expert‐elicited impact curves relating distance from infrastructure to reduction in habitat suitability, with spatial data on the distribution of biodiversity.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating spatially realistic infrastructure impacts into conservation planning to inform strategic environmental assessment

Tulloch

Gordon

Runge

et al. 2019

CONSERVATION LETTERS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Infrastructures such as roads and pipelines have environmental impacts that diffuse far beyond the local development footprint, including fragmenting habitat or changing hydrology. Broad‐scale diffuse impacts are challenging to incorporate into conservation planning and strategic environmental assessment due to difficulties in determining how impacts spread across landscapes. We built curves representing expert‐elicited magnitudes and spatial extents of direct and diffuse impacts of infrastructure on biodiversity groups, to incorporate these impacts into a spatial conservation prioritization. We demonstrate how different prioritization outputs inform different steps of the impact assessment mitigation hierarchy. In southern Australia we find the diffuse‐impact footprint to be four times higher than direct (i.e., local) infrastructure impacts, with >75,000 km2 of spatial priority areas for mitigation and >37,000 km2 of spatial priority areas for offsets potentially missed if diffuse impacts are ignored. Understanding both direct and diffuse infrastructure impacts will avoid inefficient spatial allocation of environmental mitigation, restoration, and offsetting efforts.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating spatially realistic infrastructure impacts into conservation planning to inform strategic environmental assessment

Tulloch

Gordon

Runge

et al. 2019

CONSERVATION LETTERS

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…We used a spatial planning software we created called Bungee (Balancing Unconventional Natural Gas Extraction and the Environment) to place well pads, access roads, and gathering pipelines at 84 sites across Pennsylvania (Milt et al, 2016). Of those 84 sites, 56 sites were kept for analysis due to a necessary transformation of the impact values that resulted in some sites having non-monotonic impact functions (see SI §2).…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Those 56 sites range in size (1-14 well pads) and number of layouts (2-16). Bungee is novel spatial planning software that optimizes infrastructure layouts to help avoid environmental impacts at fixed construction costs (Milt et al, 2016). Site boundaries were derived by overlaying production units on existing well locations in five moderately or heavily developed counties and then joining adjacent land parcels to fully contain those production units.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…While planning infrastructure, Bungee adheres to current regulations. In Pennsylvania, these include setbacks from buildings and wetlands, and Bungee incorporates these by designating parts of the site as off-limits for infrastructure (Brannon and Shepherd, 2012;Milt et al, 2016). Other local regulations can be included, though we did not include them in this analysis.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

“…We adjusted environmental impacts and construction cost metrics to be appropriate for this analysis. Five metrics formed the Impact Score: (1) forest acreage lost by development of forest pixels, (2) total edge-to-area ratio of forest after construction as one measure of forest fragmentation, (3) wetland encroachment as the percent of a buffer around wetlands occupied by infrastructure, (4) potential sedimentation in water bodies, (5) expected impact on rare species as the expected number of known rare species occurrences impacted by infrastructure based on habitat associations across the state (Milt et al, 2016). These metrics represent common and largely unregulated impacts from surface infrastructure across the region and were decided upon in collaboration with the Pennsylvania chapter of The Nature Conservancy, a conservation organization actively working to improve the environmental performance of shale energy development.…”

Section: Study Areamentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Performance of a cap and trade system for managing environmental impacts of shale gas surface infrastructure

Milt

Armsworth

2017

Ecological Economics

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Governments across the globe are exploring ways to reduce the environmental and human health impacts created by shale energy production. In active areas, environmental regulations tend to be limited. We apply established instruments to empirically-estimated environmental impact abatement cost curves for development of 56 sites in Pennsylvania, USA. We compare the cost to industry of setting a cap on environmental impacts from land clearing and building of surface infrastructure under two regulations: cap and trade versus a uniform, inflexible regulation. Greatest differences in cost are achieved when firm-level permits are allocated to reduce market-wide potential impacts by 36%. Cap and trade achieved this cap at a cost of 0.05% of not developing and allowed all development to proceed. The uniform, inflexible regulation cost 32% of not developing for a similar outcome and prevented 18% of firms from developing. Cap and trade's performance depended on the regulator's ability to accurately allocate firm-level permits that reflect developers' options. In extreme cases, inaccurate allocations made cap and trade perform worse than other the approach. We conclude that, where developers differ in their ability and cost of minimizing impacts, cap and trade should be explored as inexpensive alternative to traditional approaches.

show abstract

Time Series Analysis of Energy Production and Associated Landscape Fragmentation in the Eagle Ford Shale Play

Pierre

Young

Wolaver

et al. 2017

Environmental Management

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Spatio-temporal trends in infrastructure footprints, energy production, and landscape alteration were assessed for the Eagle Ford Shale of Texas. The period of analysis was over four 2-year periods (2006-2014). Analyses used high-resolution imagery, as well as pipeline data to map EF infrastructure. Landscape conditions from 2006 were used as baseline. Results indicate that infrastructure footprints varied from 94.5 km in 2008 to 225.0 km in 2014. By 2014, decreased land-use intensities (ratio of land alteration to energy production) were noted play-wide. Core-area alteration by period was highest (3331.6 km) in 2008 at the onset of play development, and increased from 582.3 to 3913.9 km by 2014, though substantial revegetation of localized core areas was observed throughout the study (i.e., alteration improved in some areas and worsened in others). Land-use intensity in the eastern portion of the play was consistently lower than that in the western portion, while core alteration remained relatively constant east to west. Land alteration from pipeline construction was ~65 km for all time periods, except in 2010 when alteration was recorded at 47 km. Percent of total alteration from well-pad construction increased from 27.3% in 2008 to 71.5% in 2014. The average number of wells per pad across all 27 counties increased from 1.15 to 1.7. This study presents a framework for mapping landscape alteration from oil and gas infrastructure development. However, the framework could be applied to other energy development programs, such as wind or solar fields, or any other regional infrastructure development program. Landscape alteration caused by hydrocarbon pipeline installation in Val Verde County, Texas.

show abstract

The costs of avoiding environmental impacts from shale‐gas surface infrastructure

Abstract: Abstract:Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As

Cited by 12 publications

References 28 publications

Integrating spatially realistic infrastructure impacts into conservation planning to inform strategic environmental assessment

Integrating spatially realistic infrastructure impacts into conservation planning to inform strategic environmental assessment

Performance of a cap and trade system for managing environmental impacts of shale gas surface infrastructure

Time Series Analysis of Energy Production and Associated Landscape Fragmentation in the Eagle Ford Shale Play

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About