The BGS keeping nations moving Environmental baseline monitoring If shale gas exploitation is to go ahead in England, the risks to the environment and human health will need to be understood and effectively managed. A critical step in this process is understanding the prevailing environmental conditions — the baseline — before any activity starts. Without a well-characterised environmental baseline, any future changes that might arise from drilling, hydraulic fracturing and other operations associated with shale gas extraction will be hard to identify. We established a programme of environmental baseline monitoring in Lancashire in 2016 in an area where two planning applications for hydraulic fracturing are being considered. This was later extended to the Vale of Pickering (North Yorkshire) where a further planning application was submitted, following the award of a £1.7 m grant by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC ). The integrated programme of monitoring being carried out includes water quality (groundwater and surface water), seismicity, ground motion, soil gas, air quality and radon in the air. The project also involves researchers from the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Liverpool, Manchester and York as well as Public Health England. One of the main objectives of the project is to make the data and information being collected widely available to the public, decision makers, industry and the scientific community. This is now available through a data portal that allows access to archived and real-time data. PRIME technology PRIME (Proactive Infrastructure Monitoring and Evaluation) is a low-cost, award-winning technology that we have developed specifically for subsurface monitoring and remote operation. PRIME combines emerging geophysical ground-imaging technology (based on electrical resistivity tomography) with innovative data telemetry, web-portal access and intelligent monitoring. It develops the basis of a new 6 Annual science review
Annual Science Review 2015-2016
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