Come Shale Away: Navigating the "Business Friendliness" of Regulatory Environments in the Marcellus Shale and Albertan Oil Sands
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In today’s often-tumultuous economic climate, the appeal of investment in North America’s unconventional fossil fuel “revolution” has remained both consistent and strong. In the United States, countless energy companies have focused on extracting natural gas from deposits of shale rock. In Canada, firms have sought to turn deposits of bituminous “oil sands” into a secure, domestic source of synthetic crude oil. But where, if given a choice between the two countries, might a firm otherwise indifferent to extracting natural gas or oil choose to drill? This Comment attempts to answer this question by analyzing federal, state/provincial, and local/municipal regulatory regimes in Pennsylvania, United States (home of the vast Marcellus Shale play) and Alberta, Canada (home to most of Canada’s oil sands). Ultimately, this Comment isolates three main differences between the regulatory regimes governing these two regions, and concludes that, at least in the near term, regulations in Alberta and the oil sands are more “business friendly” to potential developers than those in Pennsylvania and the Marcellus Shale.
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 | 0.000 | 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".