A recent study published in the prestigious journal Science shows that the fragile ecosystems of the West have suffered extensive damage as a result of increased drilling for oil and gas. This damage resulted from the complete removal of all native trees, shrubs and grasses on land used used for new (not existing) drilling operations conducted during the years of 2000-2012. How large is the affected area? It's huge. From Scientific American:
New research shows that an area larger than the land area of Maryland—more than 11,500 square miles—was completely stripped of trees, grasses and shrubs to make way for more than 50,000 new oil and gas wells that were developed each year between 2000 and 2012. Such broad industrialization may harm the ability of some regions to recover from drought and damage the ability of the land to store carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
As this graphic from the research paper, "Ecosystem services lost to oil and gas in North America," published on April 24, 2015, shows, most of this new drilling occurred in the Rocky Mountain and Northern Plains region of the US and Canada.
Most of the development studied was in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains of the central U.S. and Canada, where drilling and fracking are creating “industrialized landscapes,” often in areas that are already drought stricken. That fast-spreading development is creating additional water stress while simultaneously damaging the ecosystem’s ability to absorb carbon dioxide and store or “fix” it in plants, according to the research—a study led by scientists at the University of Montana and published in the journal Science. [...]
The plants and their carbon uptake help the landscape provide certain “ecosystem services,” including food production, biodiversity and wildlife habitat, all of which are severely degraded when the landscape is denuded by oil and gas development.
The other problem these new wells create is additional water stress to those regions where it is occurring:
[F]ossil fuels development and loss of vegetation [has] a big effect on how a region responds and adapts to a changing climate because of the water stress it creates where drilling is occurring.
One of the ways oil and gas development worsens water scarcity in times of drought is the use of large quantities of water for hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, and subsequent rounds of fracking the same well, a process called “refracturing.” The study estimates that up to nearly 34 billion cubic meters of water were used for fracking and refracturing in the central U.S. and Canada between 2000 and 2012, enough water to fill more than 1.3 million Olympic-sized swimming pools.
It may be hard to comprehend how much water is represented by "34 billion cubic meters" even in terms of millions of "Olympic-sized swimming pools." So, lets try a different comparison. According to NOAA, the volume of water in Lake Superior is 12,232 cubic kilometers. That number converts to 12.232 billion cubic meters. Thus, the fracking and re-fracturing of wells in these areas are estimated to have used water equivalent to nearly three Lake Superiors over the last 13 years.
As this study notes, half of all this new drilling occurred in areas that were "already highly or extremely water-stressed.". And the Oil and Gas industry's usage of water in these regions does not occur in a vacuum, for it competes with agriculture and municipalities for scarce water resources. Combined with the massive amounts of water used in connection with oil and gas drilling, scientists now predict the ability of those arid and semi-arid regions to recover from ongoing drought conditions has been dangerously compromised.
“One way of thinking is, it’s sort of potentially accelerating a trajectory toward a drier environment,” David Schimel, a research scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said. Schimel is a convening lead author of three Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports and is unaffiliated with the Montana study.
Energy development also pushes out drought-resistant native vegetation possibly on both the land being drilled and the land around it, and it may not grow back as temperatures rise and droughts become more severe in a changing climate, he said.
Often, lands developed for oil and gas and other uses do not fully recover their previous ecosystem functions for decades or more, Schimel said.
In other words, not only is continued burning of fossil fuels harmful on a global scale, but it also has direct, immediate and long term impacts to regions and localities in the United States in terms of damage done to the landscape and ecosystems, and to water resources in areas of the Great Plains and the West where drilling is ongoing and continues to expand. These practices simply are not sustainable.
And while it is true that renewable energy, particularly solar facilities, also impact the landscape, they do not require the use of large amounts of water, a resource that is critical to sustaining human populations in those areas, and to food production. California is just the beginning. Across the Great Plains, if we continue to denude the landscape willy-nilly of native flora and fauna the consequences will be dire. Think Dust Bowl dire and you won't be very far off.