The surface land use of fossil fuel acquisition and utilization has not been well characterized, inhibiting consistent comparisons of different electricity generation technologies. Here we present a method for robust estimation of the life cycle land use of electricity generated from natural gas through a case study that includes inventories of infrastructure, satellite imagery and well-level production. Approximately 500 sites in the Barnett Shale of Texas were sampled across five life cycle stages (production, gathering, processing, transmission and power generation). Total land use (0.62 m² MWh⁻¹, 95% confidence intervals ±0.01 m² MWh⁻¹) was dominated by midstream infrastructure, particularly pipelines (74%). Our results were sensitive to power plant heat rate (85–190% of the base case), facility lifetime (89–169%), number of wells per site (16–100%), well lifetime (92–154%) and pipeline right of way (58–142%). When replicated for other gas-producing regions and different fuels, our approach offers a route to enable empirically grounded comparisons of the land footprint of energy choices.

化石燃料获取和利用的地表用途尚未得到很好的描述，这阻碍了对不同发电技术进行一致的比较。在这里，我们通过案例研究（包括基础设施清单，卫星图像和井级生产），提出了一种可靠地估算天然气生命周期土地使用电力的方法。在五个生命周期阶段（生产，收集，加工，传输和发电）对德克萨斯州Barnett页岩中的大约500个站点进行了采样。总土地使用（0.62米² 兆瓦时^-1，95％置信区间±0.01米² 兆瓦^-1）主要由中游基础设施占据主导地位，尤其是管道（占74％）。我们的结果对发电厂的热率（基本情况的85–190％），设施寿命（89–169％），每个站点的井数（16–100％），井寿命（92–154％）和温度敏感。管道通行权（58–142％）。当将其复制到其他产气区和使用不同的燃料时，我们的方法提供了一条途径，可以根据经验对能源选择的占地面积进行比较。