Abstract
Oil and gas exploration and production activities (OGEPA) can produce surface disturbances created by the construction of roads, well pads, oil wells, pipelines, production facilities and storage pits. These alterations can range from landscape conversion to transformation depending on location, regulations and enforcement, environmental best practices and state vs. multinational management. Though not known as a major oil and gas state, Florida is ranked 23rd in gas and 24th in oil production nationally. Jay oilfield, located in West Florida’s panhandle region, is the largest and top producer in the state. Though production peaked in 1979, a nationwide upsurge is taking place that could affect Florida. The accounting from above approach proposed here is well suited to understand the role that the infrastructure surface footprint has on West Florida’s landscape and how to monitor potential changes underway. It involves remote sensing, GIS techniques and landscape ecology metrics to quantify surface disturbance in Santa Rosa County’s six oilfields and then ranks each field based on environmental performance (sustainability). Findings suggest that agricultural conversion is the leading driver of land-use and land-cover (LULC) change, while OGEPA have created small-scale surface alterations. This paper’s approach can help oil companies, land managers and local government authorities understand the spatial extent of OGEPA onshore alterations and plan future scenarios, particularly as drilling and production increase in the current shale revolution occurring throughout the US, as well as expanded drilling planned for Florida.
Highlights
As the concept of “sustainability” gains an increasingly important role in business operations, enhancing environmental performance standards contributes to this goal and adds uniformity among a given company’s business units [7]
To understand the contribution to disturbance created by infrastructure features, the direct and indirect oil and non-oil datasets were extracted from the land-use maps of each oilfield and percentage values calculated
The large amount of core areas does suggest that conservation of land was important to the land managers operating the oil fields and/or Santa Rosa County leaders (Figure 4(a) and Figure 4(b))
Summary
Florida’s first two oil wells were drilled in 1901 near Pensacola in the western part of the state, but both came up dry and were abandoned. A millionaire from Memphis, Tennessee, purchased around 5,261 km of land in southwest Florida including the “Big Cypress Preserve” in what is Collier County. He negotiated leases with Gulf Oil in the mid-1930s, but by 1938, after a number of dry wells, the company gave up. Between 1940 and 1949, 129 more wells were drilled and on September 26, 1943, Humble Oil and Refining (later becoming Exxon) drilled a well to 3.54 km and hit oil for the first time in Florida [1] This southwest Florida well was located near Immokalee about 48 km south of Naples. Humble Oil pleased with its discovery applied for and received the $50,000 bounty (after spending $10 million)
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