New Research Trends in Unconventional Oil and Gas Environmental Issue: A Bibliometric Analysis

TL;DR

This bibliometric analysis reviews global research trends on environmental issues related to unconventional oil and gas development from 1990 to 2018, highlighting key countries, institutions, and emerging research topics like hydraulic fracturing and emissions.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive visualization and analysis of research collaborations, hot topics, and emerging trends in the environmental aspects of unconventional oil and gas industry.

Findings

America is the most productive country and key collaborator.

China's China University of Petroleum is the top institution.

Hydraulic fracturing and emissions are emerging research hotspots.

Abstract

With the booming of unconventional gas production in the world, how to balance environment pollution risk and economy of unconventional gas have become a common dilemma around the world. The aim of this study is to elucidate the research about environmental issue brought with development of unconventional oil and gas industry. To achieve this goal, we present a bibliometrics overview of this field from 1990 to 2018. Firstly, this study outlines a basic statistical analysis over journals, publications, authors, institutions and documents. Secondly, VOSviewer is employed to visualize the collaborative relationship to show the link between different author, institutions, regions and journals. Finally, document bibliographic coupling, cooccurrence and keyword burst detection are analyzed to reveal the emerging trend and hot topic. The results indicate that among all countries, America was the most productive country as well as cooperated the most with other countries, followed by China, while the China University of Petroleum is the most productive institution in the world, with 105 publications. Additionally, most articles were classified as energy fuels, environmental sciences and geosciences multidisciplinary. Furthermore, based on emerging trends analysis, it was concluded that hydraulic fracturing technology has become a hot topic, other popular research topics include: energy policy and regulation of unconventional gas development, greenhouse gas emissions, energy and water consumption of unconventional gas life cycle assessment.