An analysis of the challenges for groundwater governance during shale gas development in South Africa

Abstract

As a prelude to potential development of South Africa's shale gas resources, it is critical to develop and implement effective groundwater governance arrangements. Existing policies and plans were analysed to determine whether critical gaps or barriers exist that could potentially lead to impacts on groundwater systems. Ten high-priority governance challenges were identified: (a) defining relevant metrics for baseline groundwater quality and availability; (b) developing guidelines for shale gas resource licensing, exploration, drilling, extraction, production, and completion; (c) defining and enforcing compliance monitoring systems; (d) dealing punitively with non-compliant operators; (e) mitigating and managing risks to prevent impairment of groundwater resources; (f) implementing a goal-based regulatory framework; g) enforcing strict chemical disclosure requirements; (h) coordinating across government departments and regulatory bodies meaningfully and productively; (i) implementing a framework for subsidiarity and support to local water management; and (j) providing an incentive framework that supports strong groundwater management and environmental protection. To overcome these challenges, it is recommended that a decentralised, polycentric, bottom-up approach involving multiple institutions is developed to adaptively manage shale gas development. This transition from the current rigid regulatory structure can foster cooperation and collaboration among key stakeholders. The use of a pro-active groundwater governance structure that can accommodate current, near-term, and long-term shale gas development is important for ensuring that future energy development in South Africa incorporates the influence of other simultaneous stressors such as climate (e.g. drought), landuse changes, population growth, industry, and competing demands for water.

An Investigation of the Underlying Evolution of Shale Gas Research’s Domain Based on the Co-Word Network

“…Sustainability 2018, 10, 164 2 of 23 economic research of considering the potential application of SG [7,25,[33][34][35][36], the environmental impact assessment in SG exploitation [21,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] and many others. Anyway, with the evolution from initial exploitation to the more and more complicated development of SG, the diverse research of SG can be found in available literature during past decades.…”

“…Canada has also achieved a commercial development of SG and a number of countries and regions carried on the prospecting or developing work and related pilot test of SG [9][10][11][12]. Other countries, such as Poland [13,14], Australia [15,16], England [17][18][19], South Africa [20,21], Brazil [22], India [23], pay much attention to the search of SG.…”

“…SG has complex characteristics such as large reserves, long production cycle, somewhat expensive exploration costs compared with other unconventional types of gas reservoirs and so on. The complexity of SG brings that the fields of SGR during the past years are diverse, which include theoretical SGR of analyzing the foundation of SG exploration [1,2,10,[24][25][26], model investigation in SG [24,[27][28][29][30][31][32][33], technical and economic research of considering the potential application of SG [7,25,[33][34][35][36], the environmental impact assessment in SG exploitation [21,[37][38][39][40][41][42][43][44][45][46][47][48] and many others. Anyway, with the evolution from initial exploitation to the more and more complicated development of SG, the diverse research of SG can be found in available literature during past decades.…”

Regulations to protect groundwater resources during unconventional oil and gas extraction using fracking

“…Two companies that do this are the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers (CAPP), which actively supports fracking fluid content disclosure (Ernst and Young, 2015;Ingelson & Hunter, 2014) and the International Petroleum Industry Environmental Conservation Association (2015), which supports voluntary sustainability disclosure. To encourage voluntary disclosure, the Fracfocus website (https://fracfocus.org/) stores voluntary disclosures on chemicals used during fracking (Maule, Makey, Benson, Burrows, & Scammell, 2013;Neville et al, 2017;Pietersen, Kanyerere, Levine, Matshini, & Beekman, 2016).…”

“…Rollbacks of regulations aimed at ensuring environmental protection are also problematic (Brady & Crannell, ). In South Africa it is especially difficult to enforce command‐and‐control regulations in the mining sector because the various departments have different mandates, limited regulatory oversight and monitoring, and a shortage of human and financial resources to enforce regulations (Centre for Environmental Rights, ; Pietersen et al, ). Compliance monitoring and enforcement of UOG extraction regulations by a specialized interdepartmental unit comprising the departments responsible for water, the environment and mineral extraction would therefore be useful for countries attempting to regulate UOG extraction.…”