6

Plenary Remarks and Discussion

Brian Anderson, West Virginia University and
Julia Haggerty, Montana State University
Co-chairs of the Workshop Planning Committee

Anderson opened remarks by recapping aspects of keynote presentations. Some of the overarching themes he raised included:

• The similarity between major risk pathways in conventional gas production and unconventional hydrocarbon development. Perhaps the legacy is not tied to whether the development uses unconventional or conventional technologies, but rather the potential to develop negative legacies from any hydrocarbon development, he added.
• A lot of time was spent talking about the historical legacy of wells that are already in the ground, and less time discussing the impact or potential impact of the wells that are being presently drilled. What are the unknowns with regard to the wells now being drilled, he asked.
• The shale gas production boom is not over yet. Many wells have yet to be drilled. If one embraces the process of constant innovation, an opportunity exists, given that another 100,000 wells or more may be drilled during the course of the boom.
• Anderson asked, what happens to the landscape after shale gas development is over? He described what took place in McDowell County, West Virginia about 80 years ago. At that time, the county had the highest concentration of millionaires in America. Today, it is the poorest county in the country, with the highest unemployment rate. Anderson noted that during the planning of the workshop there was a lot of thinking about the technical aspects of how to prevent problems from happening to the environment. Many of the negative legacy impacts, however, may be in communities. He suggested that the audience might keep that in mind.

Referring specifically to the panel presentations, Anderson highlighted several issues raised in common across several of the panels. He noted the growing body of work on the inventorying of wells and whether there is concern about properly plugged and abandoned wells now and for future generations. He also drew attention to the challenges and opportunities

presented by the differing regulatory environments from state to state. Navigating operations across different regulatory jurisdictions may present challenges to industry, while states may capture an opportunity to regulate according to their own environmental and administrative frameworks. Anderson also highlighted the challenges of managing, monitoring, and measuring quantitatively surface reclamation activities that attempt to minimize negative environmental legacy impacts. He suggested that a framework in which industry is incentivized to innovate and is constantly raising their targets for more effective and responsible operations is good. To move forward on legacy issues, an approach that supports constant improvement and innovation can help to address negative legacy impacts.

Haggerty offered her summary thoughts, noting, for example, the difference between a data gap and a communication gap. Many people are studying how communities have experienced oil and gas development. This area of research represents less of a data gap than a communication barrier that is important to address to make progress with legacy issues. Haggerty then summarized what she found to be key approaches and best practices, already in place, that could contribute to minimizing negative environmental legacies. She cited the need to focus on proper well casing and basic well design and effective surface infrastructure, a point also emphasized in the Roundtable’s May 2016 workshop on produced and flowback waters.¹ She also underscored the importance of good systems to monitor the equipment and to continue monitoring for the long-term. The infrastructure itself may not be so different compared to what has been used in conventional operations, but it is arriving in larger volumes and at a faster pace than previously, she suggested. Haggerty also said that the large responsibility borne by the states for the development of many of these fields is both an opportunity and a challenge. State capacities are variable and access to resources (e.g., data) is also variable.

Haggerty also highlighted known unknowns she collected during the workshop. These included:

• What is the future asset ownership landscape? This uncertainty is a great challenge.
• What are the types of information, whether data or analysis, and in what forms, actually catalyze and influence mutually beneficial change?
• Helping states plan around bonding—data on the number of times a conventional well changes ownership. Does this kind of data help clarify issues for elected legislators?
• Degree of habitat fragmentation and the challenge of surface reclamation that at a national scale appears not well understood.
• What is the actual well inventory, and how would one prioritize remediation of the really expensive site cleanups?
• The shelf life of the new materials that are being developed. This is a technological question that could be answered, but wasn’t discussed at the workshop.
• Data gaps and data sharing—it is unclear what is the incentive to share data and when. What can encourage data sharing in a positive way?
• The synergistic relationship between big data and other data (e.g., the citizen science generated data).
• Opportunities for further study on the issue of data gathering and data analysis.

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¹ Past workshop information available at http://nas-sites.org/uhroundtable/past-events/water-workshop/ (accessed on March 6, 2017). Workshop proceedings available at https://www.nap.edu/catalog/24620/flowback-and-produced-waters-opportunities-and-challenges-for-innovation-proceedings (accessed on March 6, 2017).

A participant opened the question and answer period commenting on communication and data. He noted that there are many peer-reviewed scientific papers on methane emissions, but not a lot of broad-scale knowledge on the topic. He then commented on sharing data. He thinks reasons to share data include predictability in a business environment, building trust, and political influence. Sharing data can reduce the range of conversations and help focus the conversation on the pertinent problem or opportunity.

Another participant commented on topics he noted during the day. The list included:

• Data—as a user of data, he has pulled data from the IHS database. It is a good repository for information, but one should understand what the data are. In Ohio there is a data gap. Regulators are good at managing facilities that they’re actively regulating; however, when wells are plugged and abandoned, the wells are no longer considered a regulated facility. In most states, the data management of plugged and abandoned wells is shifted to the Geological Surveys, which are poorly funded. The participant emphasized that data management, the most important component, is not being addressed. More focus is needed on repositories of data.
• Plugging and abandoning wells including idle and orphan wells, which may be leaking, in the future and the difficulty regulators have in attaining information on wells that were signed off on in the past. Further, there is no financial bond in place, as these types of wells are not regulated facilities.
• Prescriptive regulations versus outcome-focused regulations—he suggested that prescriptive regulations are barriers to innovation. He then described that when the shale developments began in Ohio, large oil and gas companies were frustrated with the state regulatory environment because they were not given guidance.
• Community impacts—the oil and gas business is a lot less about oil and gas than it is about trucking, he said. The number of trucking miles logged in the business is enormous. Thus, doing things that make operations more efficient, whether it’s pipelines or whether it’s using less water or more efficient rigs that do not require truckloads to move in and out of a location have meaningful impacts.

Another participant described an interagency working group on natural gas storage that identified records management as a problem, especially in the Aliso Canyon case, where records were factually incorrect. What really opened his eyes during the workshop was a comment by a previous speaker on the problem of records management and collection. He thought the records management problem was largely solved, but maybe this needs to be examined throughout the industry. Another participant raised the point that data needs and difficulties of the mineral resource industry are similar to those discussed in this workshop. The mining industry incurs huge expense in acquiring data and those data derive from a range of sources including airborne surveys and from measurements of different types within deep wells themselves. The data scales thus range from kilometers to nanometers with different government, industry, and academic organizations analyzing the data without a good way to integrate across those different resources and scales. This may be a common problem across the geoscience resource environment. The participant also noted that the Canadian government requires all companies that are operating, as well as state agencies and provinces, if involved, to report and turn in data for others to use on an annual basis. That requirement necessitates that data have common terminology. Different groups need to maintain the data that they own or steward and ways to allow others to access those data, perhaps under a common, trusted umbrella, are important to establish.

As an economist, the next participant noted that the workshop panelists and partici-

pants should not forget about financial uncertainty and how this impacts positive legacy in the short- and long-term.

Another participant reiterated past comments on legacy, affected peoples, and citizen science. The way these come together is that the affected people could be empowered to participate in the process. When Commissions promulgate new regulations, there is a public comment period, which is often high on emotion and low on facts. He sees an opportunity to empower the public through new data communication and analytical techniques to help address the large number of legacy problems.

A need remains with regard to characterizing data gaps and understanding how different groups perceive risk, and the overall community impact. These concerns emerge over and over again, a participant said. There is also the challenge of translating that information in an appropriate way to regulation and building trust with stakeholders. Themes not often discussed are low-probability, high-risk or high-probability, low-risk events that are not yet anticipated. The participant further elaborated using the example of induced seismicity: Could the problems associated with induced seismicity be anticipated before they occur? How can a process, like back or hind casting help with anticipating legacy impacts in the future?

A participant noted the word “risk.” Data are collected for various reasons and one of those is to ensure development of a knowledge base to look at risk in unconventional oil and gas development. He then mentioned risk communication and being able to effectively communicate information to the public and ways to get information from the public. A question was also raised about the timescale associated with legacy impacts. If one is going to do a quantitative risk analysis, one needs to think about time of exposure to a given activity, the participant said.

Haggerty concluded the session by noting three innovation areas that emerged from the workshop:

• Technology on the surface and the sub-surface, monitoring, and data analysis;
• Financial assurance and bonding; and
• Innovations in policy.

She mentioned cross-cutting policy, technology, and finance. Pushing at these interfaces will contribute to innovation in finance that will help incentivize technology developments in a policy framework conducive to those efforts.