Workshop on the Subsurface in the American West: Applying Historical and Scientific Lessons from Mining to Contemporary Oil and Natural Gas Development

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

1649919 Limerick, Patricia N. After a very brisk boom over the past decade, oversupply of petroleum has led to a steep drop in prices. This "bust" has interrupted the rapid expansion of well drilling in conjunction with hydraulic fracturing, and a trend of shutting down and capping, closing, and even abandoning wells has accelerated. A wide range of stakeholders are often improvising procedures to manage this new phase constrained by declining financial resources. The premise of this workshop is that the history of the American West holds, in a multiplicity of abandoned mines, a century and a half's worth of directly relevant case studies. A workshop for coming to grips with the history and material impact of Western mining, and applying that understanding to the current circumstances of Western oil and gas production, presents an opportunity to bring scientists, engineers, historians, and policy scholars into an innovative, dynamic, and consequential conversation.The workshop will place knowledge of subsurface activities in their broader context as practices embedded in intended and unintended historical legacies and provide a novel framework for anticipating and mitigating environmental, economic, and social impacts of contemporary oil and gas development. The central premise is that a historic-scientific approach will produce a life-cycle perspective on resource extraction and suggest practices to minimize the negative long-term consequences of intensive oil and gas production. An integrated review of past, current, and emerging sensing technology will identify data gaps and promote better monitoring and management of risk from subsurface resource extraction. Workshop participants will be selected to bridge scientific and lay/local knowledge of the impact of human activities in the subsurface. The costs and benefits of subsurface enterprises will be identified, along with their distribution at scales of neighborhood, town, city, suburb, county, state, reservation, region, nation, and planet. The workshop will draw on the expertise of the Center of the American West, in casting scholars in the humanities and social sciences as participants alongside scientists and engineers in managing the impacts of energy, water, and mining activities, rather than bringing them in as translators after the scientists have done their work. The workshop will foster public discussion of management of the subsurface by bringing together heretofore disparate voices of scientists, engineers, humanists, and local residents representing diverse communities. A published document, possibly a journal special issue, will present subsurface management strategies generated in the workshop based on review of scientific findings about the impacts of oil and gas development placed in a context of political, economic, social, and cultural relations, identified through using knowledge of historic mining. Workshop outcomes also will provide a framework for regulators and stakeholders interested in producing new policy and regulations, and create opportunities for partnerships between industry and academic researchers. Ideas for interdisciplinary approaches for teaching classes about the subsurface will be developed, including recruitment and training of researchers and other experts as guest speakers, curriculum guides, and class materials representing science, technology, and the humanities. New educational developments begun at the University of Colorado Boulder will provide a grounded example that can be made available to other universities and colleges.