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Minor Quakes In the UK Likely Caused By Fracking
Stirling Newberry writes "Non-conventional extraction of hydrocarbons is the next wave of production, including natural gas and oil – at least according to its advocates. One of the most controversial of the technologies being used is hydraulic fracture drilling, or 'fracking.' Energy companies have been gobbling up Google ad words to push the view that the technology is 'proven' and 'safe,' while stories about the damage continue to surface. Adding to the debate are two small tremors in the UK — below 3.0, so very small – that were quite likely the result of fracking there. Because the drilling cracks were shallow, this raises concerns that deeper cracks near more geologically active areas might lead to quakes that could cause serious damage."
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Here in Texas, Rick Perry encourages gas companies to poison the air and water. He calls it buttfucking the EPA or something equally rediculous, but we all know he's just making pollution more cost effective for his buddies.
Of course his predecessor, George W Bush exempted fracking from the clean air act and clean water act.. You know.. so gas companies can poison the whole country.
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welcome our new tremor overlords
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"Frack yeah!"
However, if fracking would have caused a minor quake anywhere, I would have thought it would have been in the US, because of the rampant obesity. Maybe it's all in the rhythm.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
if you're rich enough to live far away from it. Frankly I don't see the problem.
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Not to mention its potential impact on local groundwater:
http://water.epa.gov/type/groundwater/uic/class2/hydraulicfracturing/index.cfm
Even with a major earthquake occurring because of "fracking" it's a non-issue compared to the damage done to the water table by the chemicals used in the process, toxic for centuries afterwards.
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
What about doing something like fracking, except using non-toxic chemicals, for the purpose of intentionally causing minor earthquakes to release the stress that would otherwise lead to a big one? I bet many Pacific Rim countries would be interested in gradually defusing major earthquakes...
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
My guess is this also caused the quake earlier this year in Washington DC.
The energy for the earthquake is already there, so if anything, fracking *prevents* large earthquakes.
However, if you're killed by a 5.x quake that wouldn't have released a 9.x until 100 years after your normal lifespan, Do you care?
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Really Slashdot? You could not wait until at least peer review?
"The report is now entering peer review. "We want it to subjected to maximum scrutiny; it's not in Cuadrilla's interest to discover a problem down the road," Smith says."
It is not a question of 'if' there will be quakes.. it is only a question of 'when' there will be quakes. Energy is continually building up in the ground and every once in awhile the stresses are too great. The potential increases over time.
We manage potential in other areas, such as lighting forest fires and burning off brush before the potential problem grows too great.
Couldn't it be said that fracking will, at worst, cause an impending quake to happen sooner and thus it will have less potential?
"His name was James Damore."
Oy. Both the EPA and GWPC have said that there is no proven link between fracking and contaminated groundwater. 99% of what is sent into the earth is plain, non-potable water. The other 1% is made up of various chemicals of varying toxicity, the most toxic two chemicals making up about 0.1% of the hundreds of thousands of gallons of liquid sent down.
The case correlating fracking to groundwater contamination is as strong as Jenny McCarthy's claims correlating vaccines to autism. /Geologist who works for a major oil company.
If I understand correctly, quakes are the result of releasing pressure that builds up along fault lines. Wouldn't releasing this pressure in small increments prevent it from being released all at once? Otherwise a quake is going to happen sooner or later anyway. Better to be 10 small quakes than 1 large quake, right?
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At least it was shallow fracking, and not deep fracking. Think of the effects double fracking could cause!! o_o
Let's point out that the earthquakes were so small they can not be felt by man, are barely detectable, and these size quakes happen all the time naturally too.
As for groundwater pollution- this has happened, albeit doesn't usually- and there are non-toxic equivalents to the toxic chemicals that are *sometimes* used. Fracking need not use toxic chemical.
Natural Gas, whereas it is no "solar" or "wind farm", is overall much cleaner than oil or coal. (or at least can be if they regulate the chemicals used when fracking).
Anything which gets us away from coal (which is extremely destructive and polluting) is a good thing. Yes, we want renewables- but natural gas works today and is cost effective today. Trying to stop people collecting natural gas is not doing the environment any favours- because people will turn from gas to coal, which is much worse.
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we gota get that oil!!!!! mo money mo problems...
The quakes they are seeing from fracking are less noticeable than the shaking caused by coal mining.
Probably. The trick is that we'd need to know the right places to set off our small quakes, and how big we'd need to make them. I like to think that if we actually had the kind of knowledge to do that stuff safely, we'd already be using it right now to accurately predict earthquakes.
Uninformed geo-engineering is basically the equivalent of a surgeon slicing off chunks of your organs because they might develop cancer and kill you.
Log in or piss off.
It's surprising that this petrofuel corp is admitting anything at all. The truth will turn out to be even worse, as these energy corps always hide and lie as long as physically possible. They use the same PR corps that kept tobacco's death and destruction officially secret and off the liability lists for generations.
Soon enough we'll hear about even more damage the drill babies know they're doing. And then eventually, if we don't stop this destructive profit extraction, we'll hear about all the other damage they insisted on ignoring. But of course then it will be too late to matter. Which is always the drill babies' main strategy.
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and sold in the and shoWer. For legitimise doing Direct orders, or another special user. 'Now that
And you trust humans to be knowledgeable and trustworthy enough about geo-engineering to be able to produce smaller earthquakes to prevent larger earthquakes?
Have you seen how inept they are in the realm of developing software that's bug free and repairing roads and bridges? Things which are trivially easy.
Really Slashdot? You could not wait until at least peer review?
By the time an article gets peer-reviewed, it's often put under a paywall.
First off I can't believe that drilling causes earthquakes. Earthquakes are caused by slippage during the course of tectonic plate movements. So saying that drilling "causes" earthquakes is silly.
What I can believe is that it causes quakes to come earlier and smaller, by slightly lowering the stiction between the plates. Looked at this way, it would seem to be a benefit rather than an evil disaster-maker? I think most places would much prefer to have a handful of 4.0's instead of the occasional 6.5.
Afaik, the only manmade earthquakes involve using very large explosives (h bombs) or conventional explosives on bedrock. (there are numerous examples of explosives being set off near bedrock and breaking windows for miles as a result of transmission of the blast through the bedrock - neither is a true earthquake but with somewhat similar effect)
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No, there's no science concluding that small quakes overall reduce large quakes, rather than add to stresses that make large quakes larger and/or more likely. Some science suggests maybe, but even there only on some fault systems, not necessarily on others.
We are messing with major consequences that we don't understand. For short term gain, gambling against long term losses - that will be paid by someone who didn't make the short term profits. As usual.
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My father is a small time oil man in OK and I've seen fracking done. It's not black magic, and it's not dangerous. It's almost always done at deep levels that simply cannot pollute water tables absent some serious messed up concrete jobs on wells. They require wells to have concrete around the casing down a few hundred feet precisely to protect the water table from communicating with lower geological strata. The chemicals they use are in such low concentrations and small amounts that even if they did get into the water table you'd have a heck of a time detecting them. Gasland and all the other enviromentalist spew about fracking being some huge dangerous activity ignores the fact that it's been done in oil & gas fields for decades. As far as the quakes go, all oil & ng exploration has been known to upset faults and cause quakes. But most people won't even notice a 3.0 if they aren't near something that makes noise when it happens, and I have never heard of a oil/ng exploration process causing a quake that actually mattered.
Who is Italy going to press charges against for this one?
Aren't fault lines the equivalent of tumors already?
The fine people of Pennsylvania have easy uninterrupted access to hot and cold exploding water.
How dare you suggest otherwise!
I don't see how they could make it worse purely on the grounds of seismic activity. Sure the contamination might be enough to nix the whole idea, but I have a hard time seeing how "deflating" the fault line can possibly be worse in any way than waiting for it to "pop".
I can't imagine anyone who has a deep enough understanding of tumors and fault lines to accurately say yes actually saying yes.
the UK is fracked.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
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In the UK, if you're a driver, you're compelled to have third party insurance in case you cause damage. If you're a professional you generally want to have professional indemnity for similar reasons. Shouldn't companies engaging in risky practices such as these be forced to have appropriate cover in case they cause a massive earthquake as a pre-requisite for doing so?
The argument isn't about it being done right, it is about it being done wrong.
It is when fracking is done wrong that water tables are being contaminated, not with the fracking chemicals, but by the natural gas.
When you got natural gas in the local water table after fracking when there was no issue with natural gas before, then there is a problem.
Don't know something? Look it up. Still don't know? Then ask.
Non-conventional extraction of hydrocarbons is the next wave of production, including natural gas and oil – at least according to its advocates. One of the most controversial of the technologies being used is hydraulic fracture drilling,
The entire post is nonsense. Fracturing has been used extensively for over sixty years. It's hardly new or "non-conventional". It only became controversial when the AlGore fanboys realized how much natural gas is available in this country.
Water wells that are contaminated with natural gas are easy to find in many parts of the country, especially where coal is found close to the surface. I had an uncle in eastern Ohio who tried to drill a water well on his farm but hit gas instead; he capped it and used the gas to heat his house.
What a mess fracturing causes. Its another way companies found to exploit the environment and people. Nasty
[($)]
First of all, if it was all so eco-friendly why so much secrecy and 'special exemptions?'
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/03/opinion/03tue3.html
A great resource of information about Fracking and its problems can be found here:
http://www.propublica.org/series/fracking
So we can't drill for oil, natural gas. Can't use coal or nuclear power plants. How the fuck do we get new energy?
Oh that's right we syphon the heat from the earth to power our energy plants. Have we not learned anything? No matter what we do, if we do it on a large enough scale, then we will fuck something up.
I live in Arkansas, and they use fracking to get natural gas and we have had a number of earthquakes over the last few years, stop the fracking, and the earthquakes mostly stopped.
I wish someone would just go on and develop a cold fusion reactor that can't possibly fuck up anything up.
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I am new in California, but I'm told that its better to have lots of small quakes than to save up for one big one.
Maybe fracking is a way to make sure you get small quakes to let off the pressure.
fracking ... it's been done ... for decades.
You mean "for decades starting 2005 when Bush-Cheney Energy Policy Act famously exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act.. I cannot find any publicly available fracking statistics, probably because it is a "private trade secret", but if you can find something to substantiate your claim, please do.
It's almost always done at deep levels that simply cannot pollute water tables absent some serious messed up concrete jobs on wells.
So fracking is safe ONLY when "done at deep levels" AND "absent some serious messed up concrete jobs on wells." So what goverment agency makes sure that the above requirements are observed?
Looks like none:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TEtgvwllNpg
Why would they? It is exempt from clean water act anyways.
His plan for driving up the price of worthless desert just became easier!
Look it up dummy
If you're smelling something, it may well be the fracking chems. The natural gas itself, as I understand it, is odorless. The "smell" you associate with gas from your stove or grill is another gas with which they 'dope' natural gas, so that you can smell the leak, otherwise you'd never know you had a leak.
Yes, anything to stop those large earthquakes that plague England.
To sum up:
This issue hasn't been studied enough for anybody to say with confidence that Fracking is poisoning our water supply or not, and certainly not enough to say that fracking is causing earthquakes.
Regardless, most people have already made up their minds one way or the other, and are now emotionally invested in proving their prejudice correct.
This will probably taint or bias all future studies, and neither side will trust any evidence that the 'enemy' produces. This will continue until we (1) eventually realize that we've been fracking for generations and are still doing ok or (2) die, poisoned, in a massive earthquake.
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I work for a major oil field company that does frac jobs. I am not on the frac crew but I am apart of the whole frac job who monitors what goes on during the whole process. Most fracking done right now in my area of Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas are what's called horizontal fracking. Instead of drilling vertically, they are now going back in some old wells and drilling horizontally by curving around certain zones with new bits. But that process comes before the fracking. The drillers seal off the casing that will carry the frac fluid with multiple layers of cement and mud. Most of the wells I have worked on are at a minimum of 10,000 ft deep. From about 8,000 to 10,000 feet deep is where the fracking takes place and where the fluids are pumped. Very far away from the water tables which normally sit anywhere from 100 feet to 400 feet in our part of the country.
What fault line is the UK on, and how often have they had quakes measuring 3.0?
I think it's a fracking nuisance
It's fracking unbelievable!
Have you noticed the number of gas company commercials on TV that are advertising natural gas as a "clean" energy source? The truth is that the fracking process is anything but clean, and it puts our water supply at risk.
On June 30, 2011, France became the first country to ban fracking.
All Americans should see this 18min fracking video http://video.pbs.org/video/1581461555/
This video is pretty scary, and makes me question if I'm really living in a democracy.
Fracking that causes small earthquakes may be a good thing. I could see it being used much like the way avalanches are purposefully triggered on snowy peaks or controlled burns are performed on forrest areas.