دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی جغرافیای تاثیر و تاثیر جغرافیا: نفت و گاز غیر متعارف در غرب آمریکا - الزویر 2018

1. Introduction

Since oil wells first appeared in the territories of Colorado and California in the 1860s, oil and gas extraction has been an influential force in the American West. The modern western petroleum industry developed in surges of expansion and contraction during the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s. Most recently, the so-called “Shale Revolution” of the 2000s ushered in waves of new and expanded production of dry and wet gas and oil, episodes that came shortly on the heels of a coalbed methane boom. There were 150,000 well completions in key petroleum-bearing geologic basins of the West and Northern Great Plains between 2000 and 2017; 40% were horizontally-drilled (IHS, 2018). From 2007 through 2017, unconventional oil and gas development (hereafter, UOG) in the West’s Niobrara and Bakken formations (found across a number of discrete geologic basins1 ) contributed 28% of United States shale oil production and 14% of shale gas yields (US EIA, 2018). A similarly booming social science literature has documented that these subsurface activities generate a mix of social impacts and outcomes for the people who occupy the diverse subsurface spaces and places above them. The local outcomes of UOG development range from a North Dakota community that rebranded itself as “Boomtown, USA” to Colorado communities that have attempted to ban UOG activities. This essay endeavors to review and synthesize among these varied spaces, places, impacts, and outcomes.

6. Summary and Future Directions

The American West (including the Northern Great Plains) is a vast and diverse region—as its emerging UOG development landscapes make abundantly clear. This paper introduces impact geographies as an organizing concept for reflecting on local and social impacts of UOG development. We use the widely varying spatial contexts of recent UOG activities in the American West to demonstrate how geography, geology, and market conditions align to create distinct impact geographies and development cycles in UOG plays that differ in terms of timing, the nature of infrastructure and industrial organization, and social impacts. We suggest that the impact geographies framework offers an easily portable construct for approaching the analysis of the impacts of UOG and other forms of industrial development.

As developed in this paper, a proper description of an impact geography integrates UOG’s subsurface variables (geologic and technologic) with surface variables of economic, cultural, and land use conditions. By using the categories of “subsurface” and “surface” as organizing devices, we do not intend to imply that subsurface and surface variables are entirely distinct from each other. In fact, we aim to more clearly acknowledge that what happens in the subsurface influences surface systems and environments, and vice versa. We leverage these two categories in an effort to (1) bring subsurface dynamics, such as geology and changing extractive technologies, more directly into the social impacts conversation and (2) argue that the interactions among subsurface and surface dynamics be more thoughtfully integrated in UOG scholarship going forward (alongside careful scrutiny of these often taken-for-granted categories). In our application of impact geographies, we focus on the interaction of subsurface material characteristics with technological innovations and market cycles and how these relationships coalesce in development cycles that in turn shape and are shaped by surficial material, political and social conditions.