The life cycle land use of natural gas-fired electricity in the US Western interconnection

Abstract

Land presents a critical yet often overlooked constraint to energy development. The transition to a lower carbon electricity system in the United States has involved a higher supply of natural gas, incurring the associated environmental impacts. We quantified the land use by gas-fired electricity in the U.S. Western Interconnection in 2018 with a novel life cycle method that integrates machine learning, remote sensing, and geographic information systems. Our results show that the life cycle land transformation of gas-fired electricity is 0.203 ± 0.004 m2 MW−1 h−1 with production and gathering comprising 92.9 ± 0.1%. Enabled by directional drilling, active gas production in non-agricultural regions in total uses ∼6% less land compared to the peak year of 2011 and gas production sites constructed in 2018 have a land transformation an order of magnitude lower than those constructed in the early 2000s. Our study quantifies land-sparing opportunities from the multiple uses of land (i.e., agricultural production) and the co-location of wells within a single site. The findings convey the significance of temporal changes driven by the technological revolution in future life cycle assessment studies and energy systems planning studies.