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Organized Oral Session

Session: : Ecological Islands of the Southwest: Exploring How Theoretical Islands Connect Mountains, Cities, Restoration Strategies and Biogeochemical Cycling in America's Southwest

OOS 54-6 - Oil and gas well pads: transforming a developed landscape into islands of opportunity

Thursday, August 10, 2023
11:15 AM – 11:30 AM PDT
Location: 254
Much of the drylands on federally owned land in the western US are impacted by current and historic energy development, resulting in hundreds of thousands of oil and gas well pads, roads, and pipelines, creating a highly disturbed network which operators are required by law to reclaim. Although many individuals in the industry have had years of experience with reclamation, spatial analysis of historic well pad recovery following reclamation shows mixed results, where failures are often attributable to environmental barriers associated with arid lands (limited and variable precipitation, low-fertility soils, non-native species), impacts from extreme disturbance (soil compaction, salinization, depletion of soil biota), or issues of practicality faced by industry (financial barriers, time constraints, limitations in expertise). Despite this challenging backdrop, there are many avenues for improvement, and each well pad can not only be a field for comparing and assessing reclamation strategies, but an opportunity to create an island supporting a functional plant community and a real-world demonstration site for other regional operators.

Here we present results from a collaborative partnership between researchers, land managers, regulatory agencies, and private industry, which has allowed us to identify pressing knowledge gaps in oil and gas reclamation, define pertinent research priorities, and establish an array of applied studies on well pads representing the ecological gradients in the Uinta Basin in northern Utah. Early results highlight several attainable reclamation strategies that can increase likelihood of native plant establishment, soil stability, and overall reclamation success, such as tactics which address soil moisture retention (surface mulching, soil pitting) and seeding considerations (increasing seed mix diversity, modifying seeding methods). Results from this study array have been shared through multiple channels with private operators and regulatory and land management agencies (USFWS, BLM), with the aim of increasing access to usable information and improving long-term reclamation outcomes on the well pads stippling extensive regions of western public landscapes.