The United States is in the midst of a transition in energy production and distribution brought on by technological advancements and policies that have allowed for the recovery of unconventional fossil fuels from shale formations. In parallel, renewable energy sources such as wind and solar are becoming more competitive with fossil fuels.
Energy Transition
A strained, aging energy infrastructure and system is leading to critical vulnerabilities...
These two changes are straining the nation’s aging energy transportation infrastructure and revealing system vulnerabilities, as well as opening up questions about the long-term economic and environmental implications of relying upon existing energy infrastructure.
Past efforts to plan energy infrastructure did not anticipate the U.S. being a net exporter of fossil fuels, and so planning has been regionally-focused, disconnected from other plans, and treated as individual decisions, one at a time. Underlying the discussion about energy infrastructures is the narrative of population movement and growth, the layers of the old transportation infrastructures, and the changing types of energy. The intersection between these areas reveal crucial system vulnerabilities. For example, as more oil is transported by rail, fatal freight rail incidents in the US have quadrupled.
​
Such vulnerabilities are creating pressures to alleviate the strain on rail and focus on future energy infrastructures. There is a critical need for integrated, national conversations that re-think how such an infrastructure will transition over the next 20-30 years.
Anticipated Problems with Legacy Infrastructure
Pipelines and the Public
Public perceptions of risks associated with energy generation and transportation are a critical aspect of this challenge. Assessing the social concerns and the design of pipeline architectures from a holistic and national perspective is something that individual pipeline operators will not do, but such an assessment will have important implications for energy security and environmental sustainability.
This project shows critical aspects of the energy–transportation challenge: The relationship between public perception and pipeline architecture, cost, and risk.
The goal of this 4-VA project was to study a critical aspect of the energy–transportation challenge: The relationship between public perception and pipeline architecture, cost, and risk. The Atlantic Coast Pipeline was used as a case study to reveal risk perceptions, values, and route preferences between social groups.
​
This project takes a step toward identifying indicators for route preference, social acceptability, and perceived safety and health issues of proposed energy infrastructure projects. A more thorough understanding of how energy production and dedicated pipeline infrastructure are interdependent with multi-commodity transportation networks and are sensitive to changes in locations, quantities, risks, and social concerns is needed.
-
A consortium of five companies maintain ownership of the Atlantic Coast Pipeline (ACP) with no party holding majority ownership, i.e. Dominion 45%, Duke Energy 40%, Piedmont 10%, AGL Resources 5%. The ACP is designed to transport 1.5 billion cubic ft/day of natural gas.
-
The consortium sent a Pre-Filing Request to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) in October 2014. The filing reported 96% of the pipeline's capacity is subscribed, which justified the demand for additional supply capacity.
-
The ACP will affect the land use along the 594-mile long corridor with a 75’ to 125’ wide buffer. Surface water impacts are likely to increase during construction and longer term through land cover changes to riparian zones that typically result in increased total suspended solids and lower dissolved oxygen levels when forests are removed.
-
Downstream impacts include the release of both fugitive methane and carbon dioxide emissions that will result from the increased consumption of natural gas will be equivalent to twenty new coal-fired power plants or approximately 67,000,000 metric tons of carbon dioxide emissions per year.