RCN-SEES: The Marcellus Shale Research Network

RCN-SEES：马塞勒斯页岩研究网络

• 批准号: 1140159
• 负责人: Susan Brantley
• 金额: $ 75万
• 依托单位: Pennsylvania State Univ University Park
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-10-01 至 2015-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1140159&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: RCN; SEES; Marcellus; Shale; Research

This proposal is funded under NSF's Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) activities, which aim to address the challenge of creating a sustainable world. This proposal is to develop a sustainable RCN to organize and generate knowledge from water chemistry and flow data collected in Pennsylvania in the area of extraction of natural gas from the Marcellus shale. We will focus on the research hypothesis: Sustainable development of the Marcellus Shale will be enabled by creation of a database of geochemistry and hydrology developed by watershed groups, government agencies, industry stakeholders, and universities working together to document natural variability and potential environmental impacts. The proposal focuses on Pennsylvania, the site of the largest new shale gas play in the United States. The network will be led by two research universities, Penn State and Pitt, and a private liberal arts college, Dickinson, in collaboration with the Consortium of Universities for the Advancement of Hydrologic Sciences, Inc. (CUAHSI). The specific goals of the collaboration will be to i) identify the groups in Pennsylvania that are collecting water quality and quantity data in the region of natural gas extraction from Marcellus shale; ii) create and grow a sustainable network among these groups by conducting three annual meetings to discuss and organize this data; iii) facilitate the network by working with CUAHSI to organize the water data into a database that can be used to assess background and impacts across the gas extraction region; iv) train two graduate students in the development and use of a database to determine possible impacts of shale gas extraction, v) facilitate community groups to organize, collect, and interpret water data; vi) evaluate hydrogeochemical data using GIS that incorporates population and economic data in order to evaluate the potential for public health risk factors. A key aspect of the project is the involvement of a rural sociologist, Kathryn Brasier, who is investigating social impacts of Marcellus Shale development. This endeavor will also be aided by two members of Dickinson?s ALLARM, the Alliance for Aquatic Resource Monitoring, a nationally recognized technical and programmatic support center that has worked for 25 years to facilitate community organizations interested in watershed issues in PA. The RCN-SEES will work closely with a successful Research Experience for Teachers program that targets diverse high schools in Pittsburgh. The proposed effort will demonstrate that fundamental knowledge of natural and perturbed systems can be gleaned from sampling that includes citizen scientists. The focus will be Pennsylvania waters that may be impacted by exploitation of the Marcellus shale. At present there are over 3,200 wells drilled in the Marcellus but up to 100,000 could be drilled in the future. The rapid expansion of drilling has outpaced the state?s ability to document the pre-drilling surface water quality and will hamper its ability to maintain monitoring into the future ? largely because of the distributed and mobile nature of drilling and the fact that PA has more miles of stream per unit land area than any other state in the U.S. Many groups have started to monitor rivers and groundwaters in the Marcellus region. However, data collection is not coordinated and no one has collated data to document natural background levels or possible contaminants across broad regions. This RCN proposal will fund the establishment of such a database of flow and chemistry for PA using data collected from sources ranging from volunteers to agency-funded real-time data collection. To utilize this large range of data from various sources will require that we include key metadata and provide quality assurance/quality control. The RCN workshops and database will engage researchers, agencies, industry stakeholders, and community organizers to answer a challenging scientific question: can societally-relevant knowledge be generated from data collected by diverse groups of scientists and concerned citizens? We hypothesize that the answer is ?yes?.

该提案由美国国家科学基金会的可持续发展科学、工程和教育（SEES）活动资助，旨在解决创造一个可持续发展世界的挑战。该提案旨在开发一个可持续的RCN，从宾夕法尼亚州Marcellus页岩天然气开采领域收集的水化学和流量数据中组织和生成知识。我们将重点关注研究假设：建立一个由流域组织、政府机构、行业利益相关者和大学共同开发的地球化学和水文数据库，以记录自然变化和潜在的环境影响，从而实现Marcellus页岩的可持续发展。该提案的重点是宾夕法尼亚州，那里有美国最大的页岩气新开发项目。该网络将由两所研究型大学——宾夕法尼亚州立大学和皮特大学，以及一所私立文理学院——迪金森大学与水文科学促进大学联盟（CUAHSI）合作领导。此次合作的具体目标是：1)确定在宾夕法尼亚州收集马塞勒斯页岩天然气开采区域水质和水量数据的团队；Ii)通过举办三次年度会议来讨论和组织这些数据，在这些群体之间建立和发展可持续的网络；iii)通过与CUAHSI合作，将水数据组织到一个数据库中，以促进网络的建立，该数据库可用于评估整个天然气开采区域的背景和影响；Iv)培训两名研究生开发和使用数据库，以确定页岩气开采可能产生的影响；v)促进社区团体组织、收集和解释水数据；㈥利用纳入人口和经济数据的地理信息系统评估水文地球化学数据，以评估潜在的公共健康风险因素。该项目的一个关键方面是农村社会学家凯瑟琳·布拉西尔（Kathryn Brasier）的参与，她正在调查马塞勒斯页岩开发的社会影响。这一努力也将得到狄金森？美国水生资源监测联盟（ALLARM）是全国公认的技术和项目支持中心，25年来一直致力于促进对宾夕法尼亚州流域问题感兴趣的社区组织的发展。RCN-SEES将与一个成功的教师研究经验项目密切合作，该项目以匹兹堡的不同高中为目标。拟议的努力将证明，自然和受扰动系统的基本知识可以从包括公民科学家在内的抽样中收集到。重点将是宾夕法尼亚水域，该水域可能受到马塞勒斯页岩开采的影响。目前在马塞勒斯有超过3200口井，但未来可能会钻探多达10万口井。钻井的快速扩张已经超过了国家的发展速度。美国是否有能力记录钻探前的地表水质量，是否会妨碍其在未来保持监测的能力？这很大程度上是因为钻探的分散性和流动性，而且宾州每单位土地面积的河流长度比美国其他任何州都要长。许多组织已经开始监测马塞勒斯地区的河流和地下水。然而，数据收集没有协调，也没有人整理数据来记录大区域的自然背景水平或可能的污染物。这项RCN提案将资助为PA建立这样一个流动和化学数据库，使用从志愿者到机构资助的实时数据收集等来源收集的数据。为了利用来自不同来源的大范围数据，我们需要包括关键元数据并提供质量保证/质量控制。RCN研讨会和数据库将吸引研究人员、机构、行业利益相关者和社区组织者来回答一个具有挑战性的科学问题：能否从不同科学家群体和相关公民收集的数据中产生与社会相关的知识？我们假设答案是肯定的。