New drilling technologies and the discovery of significant new natural gas reserves in the U.S. are changing the landscape of energy production. As methane becomes plentiful and cheaper, it is likely to account for an increased share of energy production both in the U.S. and worldwide. Understanding the environmental implications of this shift is an important step for evaluating current and future regulatory regimes and potential policy responses to the “shale revolution.” This grant supports a series of independent research projects coordinated by the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF) that jointly aim to increase our understanding of the source and quantity of gas leaks by residential, commercial, and industrial end users of methane.  Led by Chief Scientist Steven Hamburg, EDF will bring environmental researchers from Harvard, Purdue, West Virginia University, and the University of Illinois together with engineers from the sensor industry and experts from the U.S. Geological Survey to launch a series of studies designed to measure how much methane gas escapes during its final stop in the distribution pipeline. Since methane is a more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, understanding the quantities emitted during end use is a crucial element in evaluating the potential climate impacts of a shift to increased reliance on gas. The work also has the potential to identify especially problematic, high-leak varieties of end use as topics worthy of further scientific attention. Grant funds provide research support, offset administrative costs of the project, and support efforts at synthesis and dissemination.

This grant funds the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) for the implementation of a predoctoral dissertation research fellowship program in energy economics. Fellowship support will provide young scholars currently enrolled in a Ph.D. program in economics the opportunity to deepen their study of issues related to the economics of energy, including energy market design, innovation and productivity in the energy sector, the economics of the fracking boom, electricity transmission and distribution, infrastructure investment, the effects of environmental and other regulation on energy supply and demand, energy efficiency, and the economics of renewable energy.  Fellowships will be for a one-year period with an optional second year of funding contingent on satisfactory progress. Approximately seven fellows are expected to be supported over the grant period. Grant funds will be utilized for student stipends, defraying tuition costs, and permitting travel to professional workshops and conferences.

Funds from this grant support postdoctoral researchers studying energy, natural resource, and environmental economics at the Washington D.C.–based nonpartisan think tank Resources for the Future (RFF). The RFF program has several important strengths. First, supported postdoctoral researchers will split their time between defined projects and independent research, allowing them the opportunity to build the strong list of publications that is vital to securing a longer-term university position. Second, postdoctoral researchers will have the opportunity to build and expand their professional networks in policy, academic, and private sector circles, providing them with a broader range of subsequent career opportunities. Third, researchers will be trained in valuable skills like grant writing, public speaking, presenting material to policy audiences, and event organization, all of which will be critical for their advancement in their careers. Fourth, RFF will draw on a deep roster of senior in-house scholars and its extended network of affiliated university faculty to provide job placement services and career guidance. Fifth, there are no other federally or philanthropically funded energy and environmental economics postdoctoral researcher positions of this kind, making the RFF program unique in the field. Grant funds will provide fellowship and administrative support to the program for a period of three years.

Funds from this grant support three projects by Resources for the Future (RFF) that aim to improve our understanding of the broad array of local community impacts, both positive and negative, brought on by the extraction of shale gas and oil. In its first project, RFF will develop a comprehensive risk/benefit matrix and community impact framework that will bring together, in one place, a description and assessment of the various impacts that communities may face due to local shale gas extraction, covering everything from increased demands on local water infrastructure to increased traffic and noise. The second project will explore the legal and economic dimensions of private land leasing agreements, exploring the diversity of these agreements and how their differences result in differing consequences for municipalities and their residents. The third project consists of a qualitative exploration of the development of industry-community voluntary practices, protocols, and behaviors that constitute what is often termed the “social license to operate” in different localities. The effort will catalog how individual communities have worked with oil and gas companies to manage the inevitable disruptions caused by local oil and gas extraction. Taken together, the three projects will create a framework that will capture the diversity of local responses to the influx of shale gas developers, provide useful new directions for future scholarship, and give municipalities new resources for how to manage their own local shale gas and oil development.

Funds from this grant support the continued development and expansion of PressForward, a new software platform that aims to speed the dissemination of scholarship by allowing researchers to quickly and easily aggregate online articles, white papers, reports, and blog posts into online digital journals. Built atop the powerful and popular WordPress platform, PressForward enables researchers to impose structure on the diverse variety of scholarly materials proliferating on the web, pulling related materials together that are currently scattered across different preprint servers, personal blogs, and institutional archives.   Over the next three years, grant funds will help the PressForward team, headquartered at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, continue the development of the platform. Planned activities include working with institutional partners to launch 12 new digital projects powered by the platform, outreach to build and strengthen the growing PressForward user base, and development of plans for long-term fiscal sustainability.

This grant funds the continued development of SHARE, an open access database and service that links together university-based data repositories in an effort to make scholarly research widely accessible, discoverable, and reusable. Developed in collaboration between the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of Public and Land Grant Universities, SHARE includes not only a searchable database of research, but also a scholarly research notification service that allows users to keep abreast of new developments in scholarship, for example, when a relevant new white paper is uploaded by a scholar they are following, an important dataset is updated, or a previously unpublished study is published. Funds from this grant will support the continued development and expansion of the SHARE platform, including efforts to increase the number of participating data providers, integration of SHARE into the diverse workflows of member institutions, and the cleaning and normalizing of the, oft-messy, metadata that powers the SHARE search algorithms.

Community engagement managers are increasingly seen as vital and irreplaceable elements for the smooth functioning of healthy online communities. Though it is a new field, community engagement has matured quickly, with a growing body of common methods and best practices. Individuals playing this role in scientific contexts, however, are often isolated from this community of practice, and left to trial and error to figure out how to be most effective. This grant supports a Community Engagement Fellowship program at the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for a network of community engagement managers that will connect several scientific fields. The Fellows will be based in a combination of AAAS-affiliated scholarly societies and large multidisciplinary collaborations, which will build capacity in scientific organizations. In addition, fellows will be brought together for annual training boot camps and monthly professional development webinars, allowing them to share ideas, common challenges, and best practices. Grant funds support approximately half of the planned 18 fellows of the initial cohort, with additional funds provided to offset the costs of outreach, fellow selection, and program administration.