Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
For natural gas production the EIA provides one aggregate domestic production
fi gure, but does differentiate between pipeline natural gas imports, which are predicted
to decline, and liquefi ed natural gas imports, which are predicted to increase. Fol-
lowing a similar approach to the petroleum case, we estimated the proportion of gas
production that is from gas wells (as opposed to incidental production from oil wells)
and the average annual thousand cubic feet per well (Table 3). Methodology generally
followed that used for oil wells.
The EIA provides explicit estimates of the emissions avoided (million metric tons
of CO
2
equivalent) by the use of CCS technology, relative to a 2006 baseline, for three
sectors of electricity generation (petroleum, natural gas, and coal). Because of the EIA
assumptions about the cost-effectiveness of implementation of CCS and the incentive
structures in S. 2191 and S. 1766, power plants burning petroleum for electricity do
not generally implement CCS, whereas power plants burning natural gas or coal do
whenever there is a carbon cap in place (i.e., not the Reference Scenario) and when the
CCS technology is available (i.e., not the Few Options case).
For new petroleum and natural gas production, we estimated the amount of new
pipeline needed, based on current ratios of kilometers of pipeline to wells, assuming
that these ratios held constant into the future (0.9 km/well for oil production, 1.3 km/
well for gas production). For CCS, we also estimated the new pipelines needed to
move CCS (0.5 km/well): the length of new pipeline per CCS injection site is likely
to be more limited than in the petroleum or natural gas case because CO2 has little
economic value [32]. For all pipelines, we then estimated the area impacted on either
side of the pipe (most-compact estimate 0.3 ha/km of pipe, least-compact estimate
1.8 ha/km of pipe, based on common right of ways of pipelines). By estimating the
area impacted by pipelines in this way, we are assuming that the process of pipeline
construction removes most native biodiversity, and that any revegetation after pipeline
construction will have minimal biodiversity value.
A literature review revealed that many energy production techniques actually have
multiple effects on biodiversity, which operate at different spatial and temporal scales.
A full discussion of the impacts on biodiversity of energy production is beyond the
scope of this chapter, but we recorded quantitative data on the proportion of our de-
fi ned impact zone that was directly affected by land clearing, as opposed to more dif-
fuse processes such as habitat fragmentation and organism avoidance behavior. Stud-
ies with useful quantitative or semi-quantitative data on this topic include: Coal [33],
Nuclear [34-37], Solar [38, 39], Hydroelectric [40, 41], Biofuels [5, 18, 28-31, 42],
Geothermal [43], Natural Gas and Petroleum drilling [44], [45], and Wind [22, 46-51].
Where Energy Development Occurs
The goal of this phase of the analysis was to partition the total area of new energy de-
velopment among geographic regions. We ignored energy production techniques that
had no significant cumulative areal impact as calculated above (i.e., end-use power
generation, energy efficiency gains). For our regionalization analysis, we chose defini-
tions of geographic regions that have maximal relevance to biodiversity yet are coarse-
scaled enough to average over errors and uncertainty in more fine-scaled input data on
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