Innovative Use of GIS competition is sponsored by the Department of Geography, GIS Graduate Certificate Program and the Davis Library Research Hub every other year.
In the recent competition, Geography graduate student Trey Murphy won second place with his research on “Ownership and Spatial Distribution of Mineral Wealth in Eagle Ford Shale (Texas, USA)”.
Abstract of this research is attached below:
U.S. unconventional hydrocarbon production is a driver of economic growth, but mineral wealth ownership is poorly understood and shrouded in “local wealth” mythology that claims royalties from hydrocarbons mostly benefit people who live near sites of production. Mineral property tax appraisals, as proxies for mineral wealth from a representative Eagle Ford Shale county in Texas, show that 96 percent of assessed mineral wealth concentrates among energy firms and individuals in Texas metropolitan regions; 1.95 percent of mineral wealth remains “local” to the production county, challenging “local wealth” myths. Deviating from nation-state
scalar approaches, local and regional spatial studies of other energy regions may reveal similar wealth distributions, enabling generalizations about hydrocarbon production economic outcomes.