Future of oil and gas development in the western Amazon
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The western Amazon is one of the world's last high-biodiversity wilderness areas, characterized by extraordinary species richness and large tracts of roadless humid tropical forest. It is also home to an active hydrocarbon (oil and gas) sector, characterized by operations in extremely remote areas that require new access routes. Here, we present the first integrated analysis of the hydrocarbon sector and its associated road-building in the western Amazon. Specifically, we document the (a) current panorama, including location and development status of all oil and gas discoveries, of the sector, and (b) current and future scenario of access (i.e. access road versus roadless access) to discoveries. We present an updated 2014 western Amazon hydrocarbon map illustrating that oil and gas blocks now cover 733 414 km(2), an area much larger than the US state of Texas, and have been expanding since the last assessment in 2008. In terms of access, we documented 11 examples of the access road model and six examples of roadless access across the region. Finally, we documented 35 confirmed and/or suspected untapped hydrocarbon discoveries across the western Amazon. In the Discussion, we argue that if these reserves must be developed, use of the offshore inland model-a method that strategically avoids the construction of access roads-is crucial to minimizing ecological impacts in one of the most globally important conservation regions.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".