Development by Design in West Texas:
Mitigating Energy Sprawl Through Cooperative Landscape Planning
Kei Sochi, Jon Paul Pierre, Louis Harveson, Patricia Moody Harveson, David V. Iannelli,
John Karges, Billy Tarrant, Melinda Taylor, Michael H. Young and Joseph Kiesecker
May 2021
4. How to Use These Data
Figure 9. Landscape-level planning and decision-making framework.
In the 18-county study area, an evolving transition to a low-carbon energy future is taking place. These developments point to low-emission pathways to meet coming energy demands while minimizing the associated problems of climate change. Although, this story is not without its caveats, renewables have a larger terrestrial footprint per unit energy produced compared to oil and gas production [14] and all forms of energy development will necessarily lead to habitat loss and fragmentation, which in turn is linked to ecosystem degradation, population declines of sensitive species and potential impacts to social values such as recreation and viewsheds. Sub-optimal siting will only intensify these challenges, but how these footprints ultimately play out within this landscape is still undetermined.
The Development by Design approach provides information to manage this challenge of multi-objective land-use decision-making. It harnesses the power of systematic conservation planning to bring a regional context to how the parts of a landscape contribute to the whole – to make conservation values spatially explicit and to understand the potential cumulative impacts of development across time, space and sectors to those values. The results of our analysis can be used from the landscape to site-level scale (see Figure 9) to guide the application of the mitigation hierarchy to better resolve competing goals between development and the conservation of natural resources. That is, to maintain the valued characteristics of a landscape by avoiding and minimizing unnecessary and costly impacts to more sensitive or irreplaceable values, restoring those values where possible and compensating through mechanisms such as offsets for impacts that cannot be entirely avoided or fully restored.
This report outlines some of the ways in which these data can be used to steer land-use decision-making at different scales. Additionally, this report includes best management practices (BMPs) of some of the different ways decision-making can be implemented at the landscape scale to avoid and minimize impacts at the site-level (Table 5).
| BMP Category | BMP subcategory | General description |
|---|---|---|
| Comprehensive planning | Landscape-development planning | Plan and coordinate early at the landscape level and promote shared infrastructure. Well pad sites and infrastructure should be co-located with existing infrastructure (roads, pipelines, water sources) to minimize surface impacts. |
| Constraints mapping | Avoid forested areas | Generally, forested areas should be avoided in favor of open lands to reduce forest fragmentation, changes in storm runoff, protection of stream buffers, and preservation of existing water quality in streams. |
| Avoid aquatic/riparian habitats | Operations should avoid riparian areas, floodplains, lakeshores, wetlands, and areas subject to severe erosion and mass soil movement. | |
| Avoid erosion-prone areas | Construction on steep slopes (over 15 percent or 30 percent) or highly erodible soils should be avoided. Level areas are preferred for site selection. If these areas cannot be avoided, the access road should be located in a manner that would minimize cuts and fills. | |
| Erosion control | Buffer strips | A buffer strip of vegetation, width determined on a case-by-case basis, shall be left between areas of surface disturbance and riparian vegetation. |
| Storm-water-control structures | It is strongly recommended to design storm-water-control structures and practices based on a 10-year/24-hour storm, not a 2-year/24-hour storm. This will provide better protection from the effects of larger storms on erosion, sedimentation, and stream stability. | |
| Road-construction limitations | Construct roads along the contour of the hillside. Avoid going directly up the lope or exceeding slopes of 15 percent. Properly space and install waterbars and/or culverts to prevent erosion problems. | |
| Erosion control products | Surface roads within 50 feet of waterways with erosion-resistant materials. Immediately stabilize cut banks and fill by using vegetation, rock, erosion blankets, or other suitable material. Install silt-fence barriers at outlets of drainage structures. | |
| Sediment barriers | Use hay, stray bales, or silt fences for sediment barriers in areas where excessive soil loss or sediment loads to a watercourse. | |
| Infrastructure development | Road location and design | Access roads should be kept out of lowland bottoms, drainages, wet areas, and special status and threatened and endangered species habitat. |
| Road-construction guidelines | Provide proper road drainage and erosion control for all road (e.g., use the Pennsylvania Dirt & Gravel Road guidelines for construction of permanent nonpaved roads). Ensure the maximum volume, weight, and speed of vehicles on surface roads are marked and enforced. | |
| Stream-crossing guidelines | Design road crossings of streams to allow fish passage at all flows and to minimize the generation of sediment | |
| Dust suppression | Avoid dust-suppression activities within 300 feet of the ordinary high-water mark of any reservoie, lake, wetland, or natural perennial or seasonally flowing stream or river. | |
| Stream-crossing guidelines | Locate and construct all structures crossing intermittent and perennial streams such that they do not decrease channel stability or increase water velocity. | |
| Road location and design | Avoid crossings of wetland and riparian areas by linear features. Avoid road placements that bisect movement pathways. If a new road must cross a stream, it should be done at a 90° angle. | |
| Lighting | Minimize and contain lighting | Direct site lighting downward and internally to the xtent possible and avoid uplights and wall washes, as well as lighting where the bulb is visible from the fixture. |
| Noise control | Minimize noise | Reduce noise from industrial development or traffic by using effective sound-dampening devices and techniques or by collocating infrastructure, especially in breeding and brooding-rearing habitats. |
| Restoration | Reclaim roads | Design for retirement (minimum compaction). Retire roads not used for regular well access as soon as possible. |
| Timing of operation | Seasonal restrictions | Enact seasonal restrictions on drilling and developing in areas with sensitive species (e.g., migration, breeding, or dispersal of sensitive species) or during critical nesting and mating seasons. |
| Seasonal restrictions | Operations should avoid wet seasons and wet periods. | |
| Vegetation management | Vegetation removal | Cutting by hand is the preferred method for removing/clearing vegetation. Use of mulchers and all-terrain vehicles should be avoided because they have significant potential to remove threatened and endangered species and introduce/spread invasives. |
| Riparian vegetation | Do not remove native riparian canopy or streambank vegetation where possible. It is preferable to crush or shear streamside woody vegetation rather than completely remove it. | |
| Wildlife | Bat roost sites | Void surface disturbance activities within 0.25 miles of all bat roost sites. |
| Raptor nest-side buffer | Well pads, access roads, and other aboveground facilities will not be located within 825 ft of an active raptor nest, within 1000 ft of an active threatened species hawk nest, or within 2640 ft of any bald eagle nest. | |
| Breeding-habitat buffer | Although adequate buffer distances are unknown, because of the tendency for brooding females and nesting yearling females to avoid gas-field infrastructures, areas designated as suitable breeding habitats need to be buffered from gas-field development. | |
| Road closures | Road closures may be implemented during crucial periods (e.g., wildlife winter periods, spring runoff, and calving and fawning season). | |
| Seasonal restrictions | Schedule necessary construction in stream courses to avoid critical spawning times. | |
| Wildlife crossing | Manage pipelines for shrub cover rather than grass and create forested linkages at intervals across rights-of-ways to facilitate wildlife crossings. |
Table 5. Best management practices (BMPs) with general descriptions to mitigate potential impacts from oil and gas development. Table is reproduced and refers to Bearer et al. 2012 [31] for an assessment on effectiveness of different BMP options.
Avoid Impacts
Early planning and mapping of values and projected development enables increased flexibility in decision-making before major investments of resources are already committed. This is especially true for the first step of the mitigation hierarchy – avoidance. As a starting point, impacts to High and Very High conservation value areas should be avoided when possible. Alternatively, development should be steered to lower value areas to avert conflicts or costly restoration efforts that would be required after impacts and disturbances occur.
In the 18-county study area, it is projected that 98,348 to 712,652 acres (398-2,884 km2) of new well pads, 75,614 to 96,371 acres (306-390 km2) of new solar development and 270,580 to 2.7 million acres (1,095-11,093 km2) of new wind development may be developed. Avoidance is an important strategy for high intensity impacts from energy development that entails complete conversion, as in oil and gas and solar. But there is a wide gap in the flexibility to exercise that first step. For example, in the case of solar and wind development, there are respectively 47 times and 12 times the amount of area within the Very Low cumulative conservation value class with suitable resource potential and facility siting criteria in the lowest development scenario.
Taking the landscape perspective when siting development therefore allows early detection of potential conflicts. Land managers and decision-makers can consider alternatives to steer development away from areas where values are concentrated. This strategy would not obviate the need to further examine the features that may be potentially impacted, since low cumulative value areas are not necessarily low conservation value areas. There may be occurrences of highly sensitive and important values, such as a spring or riparian area, critical animal movement linkages or viewsheds. Additional measures may be needed to avoid impacts.
This regional perspective also aids in understanding the cumulative impacts of multiple potential energy projects within and across sectors on the health of the landscape values, thereby informing efforts to improve siting of associated infrastructure (e.g., roads, pipelines). This can extend to road network design, co-location of infrastructure, and to avoid especially sensitive or irreplaceable values (see Table 5 for and Example 1 for a hypothetical siting of a transmission line).
Case Studies
Example 1.
Avoid: Finding alternative routes for proposed transmission line
In this example, a proposed transmission line is examined (a). Overlaid on the conservation values map, it can be see that it cuts across high cumulative value areas and further of the underlying inputs shows that the transmission line would fragment one of the largest examples of intact grasslands in this county. Decision-makers might consider alternative routes (b) that follow lower cumulative value areas putting fewer important conservation values at risk of disturbance.
Example 2.
Minimize: Relocating proposed wind turbine installation
In this example, potential impacts of a proposed wind turbine siting are especially concerning (a) to viewsheds in this important recreational area. The proposed site is overlayed on the data modeling viewshed areas (b) and alternative sites are considered where the proposed turbine does not impact the viewshed. It is confirmed with a second review of the cumulative values layer (c) that this new location is also unlikely to impact other values.
Example 3.
Offset: Considering conservation easement acquisition among parcels
In this example, a land trust is interested in acquiring a conservation easement to protect and restore critical grasslands areas. The land trust might consider prioritizing opportunities by using the conservation values map to take in to account the co-benefits to important species and systems of interest that occur on parcels under review. Additionally, landowners can see what values overlap with their parcels of land and connect with organizations and agencies that may be interested in partnering for restoration or conservation action.
Minimize Impacts
In the case of projected oil and gas development, at every scenario level, a quarter of the potential new well pads overlap with the upper half of the cumulative values index. With oil and gas resources being narrowly distributed, there are constraints to pursuing a strategy of siting in low cumulative value areas alone. Oil and gas production represents a high intensity and high-density disturbance on the land, but there is still much that can be done to minimize these potential impacts. For example, in areas with high cumulative values, increased efforts can be made to co-locate infrastructure or to increase the number of wells per well pad to reduce overall surface disturbance.
Wind energy facilities represent a lower density form of development that is often compatible with other land uses, such as agriculture. Efforts to minimize potential disturbances from wind development may include targeting already disturbed lands for wind development (e.g., co-locating turbines with agricultural fields). Given turbine spacing needs, wind farms typically use only 2-4 percent of an area, making these facilities compatible with agricultural production. Moreover, compensation associated with development increases profitability of lands that balance agriculture and wind development. While land in row crops yield profits of less than $1000 per hectare, farmers may receive $4,000-6,000 per year per turbine [16].
For all forms of energy production where development is likely to proceed, there are numerous BMPs that can be adopted to support goals to minimize potential impacts from creating riparian buffers, improving road location, design, and construction, and restoration activities to reclaim disturbed areas [31] (see Table 5 and Example 2 for an example of how the data can be used in the siting of a proposed solar facility to minimize impacts to high cumulative value areas).
Restore
The results of the landscape analysis can also be used to target areas for restoration activities to maximize regional ecological outcomes or to prioritize values under heavy threat of disturbance for restoration focus. For example, land managers may want to focus restoration actions to buffer around high conservation value areas that in turn can preserve ecological functions or address degradation of critical pinch points in migratory corridors (see Table 5). However, there are limits to what can be adequately restored and uncertainties that restoration actions will succeed. As such, restoration actions should only be considered after efforts have been made to avoid or to minimize potential disturbance to an area of value.
Offset Impacts
Voluntary offsets to compensate for impacts from development, that cannot be reasonably avoided or minimized, is the last step in the mitigation hierarchy. There is broad guidance available on offset accounting to quantify offsets required to balance current or projected development disturbances against future gains to those elements impacted facilitating no net loss or net gain goals. Although a straight calculation of area directly or indirectly disturbed is the first and foremost factor considered, other criterion can include the functional quality of the value impacted (i.e., impact), the background rates of loss (i.e., the degree of threat), the duration and permanence of impact, and the time lag and probability of success in achieving equivalent habitat gains. The data created in this landscape analysis can be used to help establish a baseline of indicators from which to determine appropriate mitigation and offsets for unavoidable impacts.
Offsets can compensate for direct and indirect impacts to landscape values by preserving existing high-value areas currently under threat from non-compatible land uses or by improving habitat conditions through restoration activity. Offsets can be an especially useful mechanism to fund conservation action in a landscape dominated by private landownership. Specifically, offsets can be used to fund a Payment for Ecosystem Services (PES) program to compensate private landowners who forgo development and its associated economic gains and who instead manage their lands to maintain these community-identified values, such as providing enhanced habitat for wildlife, maintaining water quality or flows and preserving scenic views, for example.
The conservation vision is a useful starting point in identifying potential candidates for offset actions. For example, as seen in Case Study #3, the attributes of different areas or parcels for conservation easement funding are compared. Alternatively, rare and sensitive systems, degraded habitat for declining species, or important pinch points for migratory corridors can be targeted for compensation to improve and restore natural cover and linkages that maintain animal movement and long-term population health in the landscape.
The future of energy production and persistence of those landscape assets that characterize the Trans-Pecos and the Tri-County Region will work itself out through a series of decisions about what goes where and what gets preserved. How likely the multiple objectives and needs of the region, the communities within it and the biodiversity elements and the people who call this place home are met, can only be improved by forward planning that incorporates landscape values alongside energy development. Overall, this report and analysis highlights that there is much to agree on about the important attributes of the region, that there is space and time available to provide for energy needs in a way that minimizes adverse impacts and that options exist of places to allocate resources to manage and conserve the attributes that make the place unique.