To maximize the efficacy of reclamation efforts, a set of national guidance and policies specific to oil and gas monitoring and assessment were needed. According to the USGS’s Featured Story “New guidelines for successful oil and gas reclamation”, the U.S. Geological Survey, in partnership with the Bureau of Land Management, published an oil and gas reclamation techniques and methods report that will, for the first time, give land managers and oil and gas operators specific tools to successfully reclaim disturbed lands during and after oil and gas activities.
Resource inventory, monitoring and protection of oil and gas sites are mandated by federal statutes and regulations, yet this is the first publication defining standards and guidelines for how to reclaim, monitor, and successfully reclaim disturbed oil and gas sites available at a national level. While it was designed to be specific to the oil and gas industry, many of the report’s concepts and practices hold the potential to benefit reclamation of other fluid minerals development and land disturbance, including wind and solar energy development.
This new USGS-BLM report supplements other existing guidance by providing thorough and definitive steps and metrics for reclamation surface management. The report provides these kinds of uniform monitoring protocols and standards covering standardized soil and vegetation field monitoring methods, indicators, benchmarks, appropriate designs and analyses and electronic data capture and repositories supports planning procedures, leasing, permitting processes and bond release decisions.
This means a major component of land reclamation involves repopulating the landscape with locally appropriate vegetation. Therefore, the report provides useful information about repositories and data collection platforms such as the Landscape Data Commons, Esri ArcGIS Online Survey123, the Database for Inventory Monitoring and Assessment (DIMA) and LandPKS.
The report also provides guidance for developing quantitative benchmarks to determine if erosion and vegetation standards have been met, including indicators of erosion and site stability, species composition and community structure. The report may prove particularly useful for restoration efforts funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, which provides $4.7 billion for orphaned well site plugging, remediation and reclamation across federal, Tribal, state and private lands (more on this in the article Through President Biden’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, 24 States Set to Begin Plugging Over 10,000 Orphaned Wells).
EcoPoint will utilize this report for future reclamation services.
Content provided by the USGS Communications and Publishing Department
