Just fracking: a distributive environmental justice analysis of unconventional gas development in Pennsylvania, USA

Abstract

This letter presents a distributive environmental justice analysis of unconventional gas development in the area of Pennsylvania lying over the Marcellus Shale, the largest shale gas formation in play in the United States. The extraction of shale gas using unconventional wells, which are hydraulically fractured (fracking), has increased dramatically since 2005. As the number of wells has grown, so have concerns about the potential public health effects on nearby communities. These concerns make shale gas development an environmental justice issue. This letter examines whether the hazards associated with proximity to wells and the economic benefits of shale gas production are fairly distributed. We distinguish two types of distributive environmental justice: traditional and benefit sharing. We ask the traditional question: are there a disproportionate number of minority or low-income residents in areas near to unconventional wells in Pennsylvania? However, we extend this analysis in two ways: we examine income distribution and level of education; and we compare before and after shale gas development. This contributes to discussions of benefit sharing by showing how the income distribution of the population has changed. We use a binary dasymetric technique to remap the data from the 2000 US Census and the 2009-2013 American Communities Survey and combine that data with a buffer containment analysis of unconventional wells to compare the characteristics of the population living nearer to unconventional wells with those further away before and after shale gas development. Our analysis indicates that there is no evidence of traditional distributive environmental injustice: there is not a disproportionate number of minority or low-income residents in areas near to unconventional wells. However, our analysis is consistent with the claim that there is benefit sharing distributive environmental injustice: the income distribution of the population nearer to shale gas wells has not been transformed since shale gas development.

Governing Unconventional Oil and Gas Extraction: The Case of Pennsylvania

“…However, Ogneva‐Himmelberger and Huang () find that areas with the most active UOGE wells—Pennsylvania's Marcellus Shale fairway—are home to significantly more people living in poverty than other communities overlying the Marcellus Shale. Using markedly different methodology, Clough and Bell () find no evidence of a disproportionate number of low‐income residents in areas near UOGE wells, but do find evidence of environmental injustice related to benefit sharing, with the income distribution of the populations nearer shale hydrocarbon wells not shifting since the onset of UOGE.…”

Utilising Principles of Earth Jurisprudence to Prevent Environmental Harm: Applying a Case Study of Unconventional Hydraulic Fracturing for Shale Gas in the United Kingdom

“…In the 1980s, Mitchell Energy, a company operating in the United States, succeeded in combining vertical with horizontal drilling techniques enabling the extraction of natural gas from previously inaccessible shale formations (Prud'homme 2014). This created what are now often classified as unconventional (horizontal) drilling techniques (Clough and Bell 2016), in unconventional (low-permeability) shale formations (Burgos et al 2017), for unconventional hydrocarbons (shale gas) (Speight 2013).…”

Focus on environmental justice: new directions in international research

“…The results of their national-scale quantitative analysis of industrial toxic emissions suggest that selective environmental enforcement emphasizing the 'worst-of-the-worst' could be more effective in reducing disproportionate social harms than other broad-based approaches. Clough and Bell's (2016) letter examines the EJ consequences of unconventional gas development in an area of Pennsylvania whose location coincides with the largest shale gas formation in the U.S. This study demonstrates how environmental injustice may not manifest in terms of disproportionate impacts on a minority or socioeconomically disadvantaged community, but through the exclusion of local residents from sharing in the benefits of a new resource economy, even as they are exposed to pollution resulting from resource extraction.…”