Oil and gas development in the Orenburg region of the Volga–Ural steppe zone: qualifying and quantifying disturbance regimes

Abstract

This paper examines environmental disturbances related to energy development in the Orenburg region through a two-pronged approach. First, it ranks environmental performance per 25 administrative districts based on multidimensional clustering of 10 diagnostic indicators. Second, it examines land-use and land-cover (LULC) patterns in nine western administrative districts by classifying Landsat imagery and quantifying surface disturbance for the year 2001. Spatial analysis and descriptive statistics help identify the most disturbed administrative units. Findings from the diagnostic indicators suggest that older fields in the western units showed the greatest amount of disturbance due to the age of the fields and related infrastructure, lack of maintenance, and the use of older technologies. These fields were also linked to declining production. Operations in the middle zone, which were younger, showed fewer disturbances, while the youngest southern fields showed the least. Findings from the landscape study showed that agricultural activity is a major driver of LULC patterns in the western region, with oil and gas activities serving a much smaller role. Methods and findings can be applied toward making extractive activities more sustainable during the various phases of expansion, new development and reclamation.

Keywords:

• oil and gas
• Russia
• diagnostic indicators
• land-use land-cover
• infrastructure footprint accounting
• Orenburg

Acknowledgments

The authors wish to thank Mary Beal-Hodges and Sherry Jensen from the University of North Florida’s Department of Economics and Geography for help and ideas on data analysis; Robert Richardson from the University of North Florida’s College of Computing, Engineering and Construction for help with GIS and remote sensing software and analysis techniques; Jim Ellis, from Ellis-Geospatial, for suggestions with geospatial approaches toward energy industry footprint analysis and environmental performance standards; and Jamie Rothaug, John Woods Herrick Smith and Robert Jordan, from the University of North Florida for assistance with data gathering and digitizing. Findings, conclusions, omissions, and errors are solely those of the authors.

Notes

1. The Sakhalin fields in the Far East contribute about 3% of Russia’s total production. Future prospects here, along with Eastern Siberia, the Arctic, parts of the Caspian Sea, and the Timan-Pechora region (in northern Russia) may contain large hydrocarbon reserves (EIA 2012).

2. In terms of reserve size, the deposits fall into major (reserves of over 30 mln.t), medium size (30–10 mln.t), and small (under 10 mln.t). The mln.t refers to volume of stocks in subsoil.

3. This is based on an accounting from above approach that uses the landscape infrastructure footprint (LIF) methodology to detect, measure, and monitor observable infrastructure features and the surrounding LULC.

4. Samara is an oil and gas producing region too (Rosneft 2012).