دانلود رایگان مقاله عملکرد سیستم تجارت آلاینده برای مدیریت اثرات زیست محیطی زیرساخت سطح گاز شیل

Abstract

Governments across the globe are exploring ways to reduce the environmental and human health impacts created by shale energy production. In active areas, environmental regulations tend to be limited. We apply established instruments to empirically estimated environmental impact abatement cost curves for the development of 56 sites in Pennsylvania, USA. We compare the cost to industry of setting a cap on environmental impacts from land-clearing and building of surface infrastructure under two regulations: cap and trade versus a uniform, inflexible regulation. Greatest differences in cost are achieved when firm-level permits are allocated to reduce market-wide potential impacts by 36%. Cap and trade achieved this cap at a cost of 0.05% of not developing and allowed all development to proceed. The uniform, inflexible regulation cost 32% of not developing for a similar outcome and prevented 18% of firms from developing. Cap and trade's performance depended on the regulator's ability to accurately allocate firm-level permits that reflect developers' options. In extreme cases, inaccurate allocations made cap and trade perform worse than other the approach. We conclude that, where developers differ in their ability and cost of minimizing impacts, cap and trade should be explored as an inexpensive alternative to traditional approaches.

4. Discussion

Ongoing shale gas development creates environmental externalities which may be internalized and reduced at reasonable costs through cap and trade. We have analyzed two policy scenarios that put a cap on environmental impacts and compared them in terms of their total resulting impact and monetary cost. We found that the policy scenario most reflective of current regulations (Uniform Cap without Trading), which forces developers to reduce impacts in a uniform fashion or not develop, may lead to expensive outcomes with few options to reduce impacts while still allowing all development to proceed (Fig. 1). In contrast, a cap and trade system (Cap and Trade) could achieve impact caps from 0 to 32 percentage points cheaper than the uniform commandand-control policy, depending on the level of impact society is willing to accept (Fig. 1). The relative costs of Cap and Trade versus Uniform Cap without Trading converge at higher or lower levels of avoidance. We also determined that the performance of cap and trade depends on the number of permits allocated to each developer, which may be affected by the regulator's ability to estimate impacts in the absence of the additional regulation. For instance, Cap and Trade could be totally ineffective if the regulator systematically overestimated those impacts and had a low commitment to reducing impacts (Fig. 2b). Also, the impact avoided for a $1B investment in Cap and Trade could be almost three orders of magnitude lower than ideal if the regulator systematically underestimated those impacts by N25% (Fig. 2c).