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

• Published in: Conservation biology 2016-12, Vol.30 (6), p.1151-1158
• Main Authors: Milt, Austin W., Gagnolet, Tamara D., Armsworth, Paul R.
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: access roads; agrupación de tuberías; carreteras de acceso; conjunto de pozos; Conservation of Natural Resources; conservation planning; Conservation Practice and Policy; Ecosystem; Energy consumption; environmental externalities; Environmental impact; externalidades ambientales; Forests; Fresh Water; gathering pipelines; Infrastructure; multiobjective planning; Natural Gas; Oil shale; optimización espacial; planeación de la conservación; planeación multiobjetiva; políticas de gas de esquisto; shale-energy policy; spatial optimization; well pads
• ISSN: 0888-8892; 1523-1739
• DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12766

Growing energy demand has increased the need to manage conflicts between energy production and the environment. As an example, shale-gas extraction requires substantial surface infrastructure, which fragments habitats, erodes soils, degrades freshwater systems, and displaces rare species. Strategic planning of shale-gas infrastructure can reduce trade-offs between economic and environmental objectives, but the specific nature of these trade-offs is not known. We estimated the cost of avoiding impacts from land-use change on forests, wetlands, rare species, and streams from shale-energy development within leaseholds. We created software for optimally siting shale-gas surface infrastructure to minimize its environmental impacts at reasonable construction cost. We visually assessed sites before infrastructure optimization to test whether such inspection could be used to predict whether impacts could be avoided at the site. On average, up to 38% of aggregate environmental impacts of infrastructure could be avoided for 20% greater development costs by spatially optimizing infrastructure. However, we found trade-offs between environmental impacts and costs among sites. In visual inspections, we often distinguished between sites that could be developed to avoid impacts at relatively low cost (29%) and those that could not (20%). Reductions in a metric of aggregate environmental impact could be largely attributed to potential displacement of rare species, sedimentation, and forest fragmentation. Planners and regulators can estimate and use heterogeneous trade-offs among development sites to create industry-wide improvements in environmental performance and do so at reasonable costs by, for example, leveraging low-cost avoidance of impacts at some sites to offset others. This could require substantial effort, but the results and software we provide can facilitate the process. La creciente demanda de energía ha incrementado la necesidad de manejar los conflictos entre la producción de energía y el ambiente. Como ejemplo, la extracción de gas esquisto requiere de una infraestructura superficial sustancial, la cual fragmenta los habitats, erosiona el suelo, degrada los sistemas de agua dulce y desplaza a las especies raras. La planeación estratégica de la infraestructura de gas esquisto puede reducir las compensaciones entre los objetivos económicos y ambientales, pero la naturaleza específica de estas compensaciones no se conoce. Estimamos el costo de evitar los impa