Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
h e other knock against unconventional oil and gas production is that
even if drilling is restricted to small pads, the operations tend to break
up landscapes with access roads and pipelines, rendering much wider
spaces unusable, just as arrays of wind turbines and solar panels do. h
e
cumulative impact in both cases can be large.
Yet there are limits to how much worse fossil fuels can get when
it comes to land use, as well as how much alternative energy sources
can improve, leaving alternatives still ot en facing substantial pub-
lic resistance. Moreover, the bat le over local environmental conse-
quences doesn't just apply to energy itself; it ot en rises to the most
intense level when it's turned to moving energy from place to place,
using pipelines and power lines, as with Keystone XL. (Being able
to build new power lines that connect windy and sunny locations
to places that use a lot of power is ultimately essential to building
out renewable energy.) People might not like having drilling pads in
their backyard or wind turbines in their i elds, but they can usually
extract good money from developers in exchange for the rights to
their land. Pipelines and power lines present a fundamentally dif er-
ent challenge. h ey can cross thousands of miles, and hence a huge
number of properties, posing a challenge with each one. At the same
time, any given bit of land is a lot less valuable to a pipeline or power-
line developer than an oil- or gas-rich tract is, so people whose land
might be disturbed don't get paid as much for the impact. Add on
top of this the fact that a given pipeline or power line can cross half
a dozen or more states, each with its own rules and regulators, and
you've created quite a mess.
Advocates for renewable energy, of course, argue that the two types
of land disturbances are fundamentally dif erent from each other, that
there is something innately dissimilar about blowing up mountaintops
to extract coal or dot ing rural spaces with drilling pads on the one
hand and covering desert landscapes with solar collectors or dropping
dozens of wind turbines of shore on the other. Daniel Kammen and
two colleagues of his at Berkeley have writ en that “both wind and solar
are compatible with many other land uses and neither can be said to
spoil the land they sit on in any way analogous to fossil fuel extraction
or nuclear waste storage.” 77
 
 
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