title: The costs of avoiding environmental impacts from shale-gas surface infrastructure.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 569 Dabney Hall, 1416 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996, U.S.A.. milt@wisc.edu.
authors.forename: Austin W
authors.initials: AW
authors.lastname: Milt
authors.affiliation: The Nature Conservancy, Pennsylvania Chapter, 2101 North Front Street, Building #1, Suite 200, Harrisburg, PA, 17110, U.S.A.
authors.forename: Tamara D
authors.initials: TD
authors.lastname: Gagnolet
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, 569 Dabney Hall, 1416 Circle Drive, Knoxville, TN, 37996, U.S.A.
authors.forename: Paul R
authors.initials: PR
authors.lastname: Armsworth
mesh_terms: D003247:Conservation of Natural Resources; D017753:Ecosystem; D065928:Forests; D005618:Fresh Water; D059206:Natural Gas
chemical_list: D059206:Natural Gas
keywords: access roads; agrupación de tuberías; carreteras de acceso; conjunto de pozos; conservation planning; environmental externalities; externalidades ambientales; gathering pipelines; multiobjective planning; optimización espacial; planeación de la conservación; planeación multiobjetiva; políticas de gas de esquisto; shale-energy policy; spatial optimization; well pads