Impact Of Fuling Shale Gas Development On Household Water Consumption: Averting Expenditure

The shale gas revolution in the United States has had a big impact on global energy supply and demand,and China is now actively promoting the development of shale gas.Though the development of shale gas has effectively eased China's traditional energy dependence,it brought a certain degree environmental risks.In particular,the hydraulic fracturing technology used in shale gas development could have an impact on nearby water resources,which directly or indirectly affects the local population's water use.To avoid the risks of water resource,local residents have chose to use the adjustment of water mode of the structure ratio or installation of water purification devices and other circumvention measures.Thus the extra expenditure caused by these averting behaviors is the averting expenditure brought by the development of shale gas to the local residents.This paper uses residents' averting expenditure as a quantitative index to measure the impact of shale gas development on water resources.For the empirical analysis,this paper applies the quasi-experiment approach with the Difference-in-Difference model and Propensity Score Matching method to identify the effects of shale gas development on the cost of household water usage.To fulfill this,two groups of people are surveyed in Chongqing,China.One group lives in Jiaoshi town,where Fuling shale gas wells are located and this group of people were selected as the experimental group.The other group of people lives in the town of Yihe which is far from shale gas wells,and they were selected as the control group.Eventually,500 households were interviewed through face-to-face questionnaires.The results find that the development of shale gas will increase the amount of living water expenditure per household in Jiaoshi town by about ?17.00 per month.On the basis,it is used to estimate the economic costs of the environmental impact of living water consumption caused by shale gas development,which lend some support for the policy formulation of sustainable development of shale gas.