Estimation of regional air-quality damages from Marcellus Shale natural gas extraction in Pennsylvania
By Aviva Litovitz, Aimee Curtright, S. Abramzon, Nicholas E. Burger, Constantine Samaras. 2013
164 citations recorded by the source corpus.
This letter provides a first-order estimate of conventional air pollutant emissions, and the monetary value of the associated environmental and health damages, from the extraction of unconventional shale gas in Pennsylvania. Region-wide estimated damages ranged from $7.2 to $32 million dollars for 2011. The emissions from Pennsylvania shale gas extraction represented only a few per cent of total statewide emissions, and the resulting statewide damages were less than those estimated for each of the state’s largest coal-based power plants. On the other hand, in counties where activities are concentrated, NOx emissions from all shale gas activities were 20–40 times higher than allowable for a single minor source, despite the fact that individual new gas industry facilities generally fall below the major source threshold for NOx. Most emissions are related to ongoing activities, i.e., gas production and compression, which can be expected to persist beyond initial development and which are largely unrelated to the unconventional nature of the resource. Regulatory agencies and the shale gas industry, in developing regulations and best practices, should consider air emissions from these long-term activities, especially if development occurs in more populated areas of the state where per-ton emissions damages are significantly higher.
Subfields: Atmospheric Science, Economics and Econometrics, Global and Planetary Change
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/adebaf45370ae4aa23f48520de941368da15c8b1
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Citations in the corpus
- Fracking and environmental (in)justice in a Texas city (2015, background): “Research also highlights economic costs; for example, Litovitz et al. (2013) estimate millions of dollars of socioecological damages from SGD air pollution in Pennsylvania.”
- The Economics of Shale Gas Development (2015, background): “Estimates of the quantity of these emissions in Pennsylvania in 2011 suggest they were only a small fraction of total statewide emissions in the state (Litovitz et al. 2013).”
- The Environmental Costs and Benefits of Fracking (2014, background): “In Pennsylvania, estimates of NOx, VOCs, PM, and SO2 emissions from shale-gas development and production are poorly constrained, varying by a factor of 2 to 5; nevertheless, natural gas– powered compressor stations placed every 50–100 miles to push natural gas through gathering and transmission pipe”