The governance of hydraulic fracturing in unconventional resources: the elements, form and effectiveness of the regulations
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Hydraulic fracturing is a process applied for the exploitation of certain hydrocarbon and geothermal resources, to increase the fluid conductivity to a production well. The process entails environmental risks that are managed under specific regulations in most jurisdictions where economic resources of this type are found. For the purpose of this thesis, the process of unconventional resource development (chronological phases) associated with hydraulic fracturing operations was subdivided into 32 aspects, each subject to regulation.This study looked at the structure and form of regulation from jurisdictions across the world by identifying “regulatory statements” (a single-purpose legal requirement) and deconstructing those statements using the institutional grammar tool, in order to allow inter-jurisdictional comparison. The regulatory statements were categorized under a regulatory form typology to identify whether each statement was prescriptive, process-based, principle-based or performance-based. This analysis determines whether the jurisdiction tells the participant “what to do”, “how to do it”, “how to do it and where to get to” or just “where to get to”.Twelve jurisdictions were selected from North and South America, Australia and Africa, each with active, or the potential for, commercial unconventional resource development. Initial selection criteria for jurisdictions included: a constitutional democracy, comprehensive environmental protection legislation, a history of petroleum development, and a high potential for unconventional resource development. Final selection of jurisdictions focussed on a suite that provided a range of scales across commercial development of the resource; and, development or otherwise, of hydraulic fracturing legislation. Over 1,900 rules were identified, categorised and analysed establishing a range of trends.This study found overwhelming application of prescriptive regulatory statements (what to do) at 88.5% occurrence, process-based statements (how to do it) at 8.2%, principle-based statements (how to do it and where to get to) at 2.8% and performance-based statements (where to get to) at just 0.5%.The application of principle/performance statements were more frequent in those jurisdictions where there was minimal or no commercial development of unconventional resources, with Brazil and New South Wales at 13% and 11% respectively. Those jurisdictions with substantial unconventional resource development and a large number of operators used prescription almost exclusively, including Alberta, British Columbia and Colorado. Those aspects of regulation addressing public interfacing with the operators such as setback, access to water resource and seismic effects tended to show little use of performance regulation whereas complex areas centred around the well itself, involving engineering judgement, had a greater application of principle/performance statements.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 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".