Forecasting the Impacts of Shale Gas Developments on Public Health and Transportation Systems on Both Sides of the Mexico-U.S. Border
Zenon Medina-Cetina, Patricia Varela, August 2015
The activities completed for this project includes the literature research on the Eagle Ford formation, the review of public-health and transportation related variables to shale gas developments, and the definition of the project collaborative site at Prof. Medina-Cetina’s Stochastic Geomechanics Laboratory SGL server.
Also, a collection of spatial data from the Eagle Ford Shale, including transportation infrastructure, geology, hydrology, demography, and well production was gathered. In this project, researchers developed an improvement of the proposed Bayesian Network for the regional assessment of environmental and social risk (i.e., transportation infrastructure and public health) by enhancing the BN+GIS Model for Environmental Sensibility assessment including a Surface Water variable. This required the improvement and optimization of the code producing BN+GIS results to reduce computational time. Afterward, researchers attained results on the implementation of enhanced BN+GIS model in the Barnett Shale Play. Consequently, researchers completed a paper to be submitted in the ASCE-ASME Journal of Risk and Uncertainty in Engineering Systems named “Bayesian Networks and Geographical Information Systems for Environmental Risk Assessment for Oil and gas Site Developments.”
Following up this activity, researchers defined the objectives, hypothesis, and methodology for a parametric sensitivity analysis on the BN+GIS Model used for Risk Assessment on the Barnett Shale. Additionally, researchers developed an investigation about commercially available simulators (software) used for estimating production in unconventional reservoirs.
Keywords: Bayesian Networks, Risk Assessment, GIS, Environmental Impact
ENTIRE REPORT (Adobe Acrobat File – 2.3 MB)