Seismic shifts from regulations: Spatial trade-offs in marine mammals and the value of information from hydrocarbon seismic surveying

Maarten Punt and Brooks Kaiser

No 2/19, Working Papers from University of Southern Denmark, Department of Sociology, Environmental and Business Economics

Abstract: Seismic surveys can increase hydrocarbon deposit information, lowering subsequent expected costs of hydrocarbon exploration. Survey noise, however, can interfere with marine mammals and fishes, reducing fitness. Ice-covered Arctic waters temporally constrain both surveying and marine mammal species; damage mitigation requires temporal and spatial planning. The survey noise externality is stronger than that for drilling (Erbe, 2012); there is additional cost to marine species’ habitat versus drilling alone. We develop a spatially explicit bio-economic and Value-of-Information (VOI) model examining these tradeoffs and illustrate it for oil exploration decisions off the Western Greenlandic coast. We use cost-effectiveness to identify implicit thresholds for sound habitat quality conservation as a function of regulatory choices that have different impacts under different assumptions about the relative spatial values of marine mammal habitat maintenance.

Keywords: Value of Information (VOI); seismic surveys; marine mammals; marine habitat; marine noise pollution; hydrocarbon exploration; Arctic oil and gas exploration; evaluation of regulatory programs; spatial bio-economic modelling (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 Q35 Q53 Q57 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2019-03
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ene and nep-env
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Related works:
Journal Article: Seismic Shifts from Regulations: Spatial Trade-offs in Marine Mammals and the Value of Information from Hydrocarbon Seismic Surveying (2021)
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