[S02-P] Poster

[S02-P-10] Evaluation of the induced risks caused by shale gas exploration and exploitation

Paolo Capuano^{1, 2}, Beata Orlecka-Sikora³, ^○Stanislaw Lasocki³, Simone Cesca⁴, Andrew Gunning⁵, Janusz Jaroslawsky³, Alexander Garcia-Aristizabal², Rachel Westwood⁶, Paolo Gasparini² (1.The University of Salerno, Fisciano (SA), Italy, 2.Center for the Analysis and Monitoring of Environmental Risk (AMRA), Napoli, Italy, 3.Institute of Geophysics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Warsaw, Poland, 4.GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany, 5.RSKW Ltd, United Kingdom, 6.The University of Keele, Keele, United Kingdom)

Shale gas operations may affect the quality of air, water and landscapes; furthermore, it can induce seismic activity, with the possible impacts on the surrounding infrastructure. SHEER (SHale gas Exploration and Exploitation induced Risks) project aims at setting up a probabilistic methodology to assess and mitigate the short and the long term environmental risks connected to the exploration and exploitation of shale gas. A test site located in Poland has been monitored before, during and after the fracking operations with the aim of assessing environmental risks connected with groundwater contamination, air pollution and earthquakes induced by fracking and injection of waste water. The severity of each of these hazards depends strongly on the unexpected enhanced permeability pattern, which may develop as an unwanted by-product of the fracking processes. The considered hazards may be partially inter-related as they all depend on this enhanced permeability pattern. Therefore they are being approached from a multi-hazard, multi parameter perspective. Methodologies have been developed to model fracture evolution around shale gas exploitation sites and a robust statistically based, multi-parameter methodology to assess environmental impacts and risks across the operational lifecycle of shale gas has been defined. All the developed methodologies are applied and tested on a comprehensive database consisting of seismicity, changes of the quality of ground-waters and air, ground deformations, and operational data collected from the ongoing monitoring episode (Wysin, Poland) and past episodes. Best practices to be applied in Europe to monitor and minimize any environmental impacts will be worked out with the involvement of governmental decisional bodies, private industries and experts
This work was supported under SHEER: "Shale Gas Exploration and Exploitation Induced Risks" project n.640896, funded from Horizon 2020 - R&I Framework Programme, call H2020-LCE-2014-1