Question

2. Oil and natural gas activity e ord Shale play in this region. The explosion of oil/gas drilling actives results in tremendous enailenges to the transportation system in South Texas, for example overworked roads, overloaded Eagle Ford Shaviis booming again in South Texas due to the 2008 discovery of the trucks, and increasing accidents etc. Bringing a gas well into production requires more than 1,000 loaded trucks traveling to and from a well site, the equivalent of 8 million cars, according to TxDOT. In two drilling hot spots, the Eagle Ford Shale in South Texas and the Permian Basin in West Texas, crumbling asphalt and widening potholes are becoming more common" Fatal traffic accidents increased 40 percent in the Eagle Ford Shale region last year, according to preliminary data released Friday by the Texas Department of Transportation. There were more than 2.72 fatal and serious injury crashes, and 248 fatalities in 2012 in the 23-county swath of South Texas, where oil and gas drilling has exploded." As a future civil/transportation engineer, how would you like to address these cl transportation system of Eagle Ford Shale region? (40 points) ke to address these challenges in

Answer 1

Good Morning Sir/Madam

With the 2008 discovery of Oil / Natural gas activities at Eagle Ford Shale Play in South Texas, the region was booming again.

But recently explosion took place in oil/ natural gas activities which resulted in tremendous changes/ problems occurred to the transport system in South Texas. Some of the problems mentioned in the problem are Overworked Roads, Overloaded trucks, and increasing Accidents,etc which clearly indicates the transportation crisis in South Texas.

Texas’s energy sector has a critical impact—historically and currently—on both the state economy and Texas’s transportation system. The state’s various transportation modes, including Rail, highways, pipelines, and ports, form a system that supports the energy sector in a number of ways. Examples include (a) the movement of various components during the construction and implementation of the energy source (e.g., wind turbines and solar farms), (b) the provision of enabling infrastructure (e.g., transmission lines), and (c) the movement of the intermediate and final products in some energy supply chains (e.g., low sulfur mid-west coal by Class 1 unit trains to the major coal burning plants in Texas). It was thus critical that TxDOT develop a better understanding of how the energy sector uses Texas’s transportation system, as well as quantify the impacts on Texas’s highway infrastructure to ensure adequate maintenance funding. The research team thus developed supply chains for Texas’s major energy industries: natural gas, oil, coal, wind, and bio-fuels. These supply chains were subsequently used to estimate the impacts of Texas’s wind, natural gas, and oil industries on Texas’s highway infrastructure.

Natural gas development in the Barnett Shale region of Texas has been a major Contributor to the economic prosperity of the region. However, from a highway infrastructure perspective, it has resulted in increased maintenance costs for TxDOT’s Fort Worth and Dallas districts. Developing a natural gas well results in a significant increase in truck traffic due to the movement of materials and equipment, building the pad site and access roads, the drilling and fraccing operations, and finally saltwater disposal from the site. The traffic associated with each of these activities differs in terms of the average haul distance, duration of the operation, truck volumes, axle configuration, and axle weights. Thus, the traffic associated with natural gas development was categorized as (1) traffic associated with the mobilization of the drill rig and accessories; (2) construction traffic, including rock haulers, transportation of frac sand, water, and backflow water from the wells; and (3) the saltwater disposal traffic.
The movement of the drill rig is a one-time event in the service life of a gas well. Truck
traffic associated with the fraccing of the well, on the other hand, occurs every 5 years to maintain the production level of the well. Finally, the saltwater disposal traffic is a routine Operation, as the saltwater must be transported from the well site to the nearest injection tank farm over the life of the well.
The associated damage imposed by each of these trucking operations was evaluated using the MEPDG with respect to three primary distress mechanisms: rutting, longitudinal cracking, and alligator cracking. Pavement roughness was also evaluated. The results indicated that construction traffic has the most serious impact in terms of the damage imposed on the pavement structure irrespective of the distress mechanism used. The rig traffic appears to have a negligible impact on the pavement structure, while the saltwater traffic has some impact on the pavement structure. The overall impact of the rig traffic, construction traffic, and saltwater traffic from a rutting perspective is about 1.6%, 13%, and6%, respectively, in additional damage. It was observed that the construction traffic’s damaging impacts is partly attributable to high axle weights and volumes over a very short time period.
The additional damage imposed by the truck traffic associated with natural gas development will also result in a reduction in the service life of the pavements. Assuming that the pavements were constructed to reach their terminal distress values at the end of the analysis period, given the design traffic, the time to reach the same terminal distress value was calculated due to the combined effect of the design traffic and the natural gas traffic. Under the premise that the trucking corridors used by the rig traffic, the construction traffic, and the saltwater disposal traffic are mutually exclusive, it was found that the overall reduction in the pavement service life
due to each of these three activities were 5.6%, 29%, and 16%, respectively.
Finally, it has to be noted that other traffic generating activities associated with the natural gas industry may impact the transportation system in ways that were not estimated. For
example, seismic exploration conducted by vibe buggies and thumper trucks may impact the roadway infrastructure and the underlying pipeline network. Also pipeline construction to move
the natural gas from the gas well to consumption centers may require digging up parts of state owned rights-of-way and potential truck trips can be generated by the movement of natural gas
itself. However, only about 5% of all natural gas produced in the U.S. is moved by truck. These activities are, however, difficult to quantify as no real measurable parameters are collected that can be analyzed. Therefore, to conclude, it is important to mention that many other activities in the natural gas energy supply chain may potentially impact Texas’s transportation system. The
data available, however, allowed only for the quantification of the impacts of the construction traffic and salt water disposal traffic.

So Texas’s transportation system is very important in the procurement and distribution of crude oil. Texas’s transportation system facilitates three major activities in the crude oil supply chain: 1) well development, 2) oil production, and 3) petrol gasoline distribution. These three activities have different transportation impacts. The construction phase of an oil well development involves building access roads to the site, rigging up, drilling, rigging down, and well completion. The entire operation involves numerous truck trips to and from the well site to bring materials and the equipment necessary for constructing the oil well. The mobilization of the rotary rig requires OS/OW permits while all the remaining loads are transported on conventional combination trucks. It was observed that the VMT of the construction traffic was more or less evenly distributed among US Highways, State Highways, and FM Roads with a slightly lower utilization of the Interstate System.

The production traffic associated with crude oil development is mostly responsible for the transportation of the oil from the tank batteries located near the well site to the pipeline breakout stations. In the case of the production traffic, the Interstate System represents 5% of the total VMT while Access Roads, County Roads, and FM Roads account for almost 50% of the total VMT. The results from this research study indicate that the construction traffic has little to no impact on Texas’s highway infrastructure. The additional damage imposed by the truck traffic involved with the construction activities range between 0.5% and 4%, depending on the distress mechanism considered. The additional damage will translate into a reduction in the service lives of the facilities that are in use, but the estimates provided in this study indicate that the construction traffic will reduce the expected service life of the highway facilities in the Permian Basin region by about 1.8%.

On the other hand, the production traffic has a far more serious effect on Texas’s road infrastructure. The additional damage due to the production truck traffic is 24% and 3% from a fatigue cracking and rutting perspective, respectively. The impact on the service life of highway facilities in the region is also naturally more serious in the case of the production truck traffic than the construction traffic. It was estimated that the additional damage can reduce the service
life of pavement structures by almost 9%. The unrelenting nature of the operation and a higher utilization of the lower functional road classes for hauling the crude oil to the breakout stations are the primary reasons for the reduction in the pavement service lives.
It should also be noted that the additional damage and the reduction in service life of pavement structures due to the construction and production truck traffic has been estimated
separately. In other words, an overlap between the corridors used for the two different operations has not been considered. However, in reality this might very well be the situation, especially for the last leg in the supply chain as access to the oil well might be provided by one or two different roads. Thus, the estimates provided in this study are conservative and could be much more severe if there is an overlap between the corridors used by the truck traffic associated with these two different operations.
Finally, the impacts of the gasoline distribution traffic on Texas’s highway infrastructure were not estimated, because of a lack of reliable data. Gasoline distribution traffic is, however, largely a function of the population size and density in a region. Major urban population centers in Texas, such as Houston, San Antonio, El Paso, and the Dallas-Fort Worth area, thus generate substantial distribution traffic, which will theoretically impact the highway networks in these urban areas.

Thanking you sir/Madam