Slashdot Mirror
Did Fracking Cause Recent Oklahoma Earthquakes?
Hugh Pickens writes writes "Oklahoma is typically seismically stable, with about 50 small quakes a year — but in 2009, that number jumped up to more than 1,000 and on November 5 a 5.6-magnitude tremor rattled Oklahoma — one of the strongest to ever hit the state — leading scientists to wonder if the increasingly common use of fracking, the controversial practice of blasting underground rock formations with high-pressure water, sand, and chemicals to extract natural gas, may have put stress on fault lines. Human intervention has caused earthquakes before with one 'textbook case' occurring in 1967 in India, says Peter Fairley at IEEE Spectrum, when the reservoir behind the hydroelectric Koyna Dam was filled up. The added water 'unleashed a magnitude 6.3 quake' by placing stress 'on a previously unknown fault, killing 180 people and leaving thousands homeless.' Last week's earthquakes and aftershocks are centered in rural Lincoln County, in an area about 30 miles east of Oklahoma City and there are 181 injection wells In Lincoln County. But a recent study by Austin Holland, a seismologist with the Oklahoma Geological Survey, says that it's possible that hydraulic fracking caused a series of small earthquakes, peaking at 2.8, in an area south of Oklahoma City but doesn't believe fracking caused the big Nov. 5, 6 and 8 earthquakes comparing a man-made earthquake to a mosquito bite. 'It's really quite inconsequential,' says Holland."
Most of the news around here (Oklahoma) is saying probably not. The seismologists that have been on are saying that, while the earthquakes were shallow, they were still far too deep to be caused by fracking.
The Butterfly Effect is described in terms of weather systems, where it's total bullshit.
But here, not so much. The ground under us is full of cracks that have stopped moving because they're caught on something. Break that something, and you unleash a quake. If the reason the crack can't produce enough force is because there's another, smaller thing they're caught on, too, then all you have to do is break that smaller thing to allow the bigger thing to feel enough stress to be broken.
And so on.
As I said, this is bullshit in the atmosphere, where violence is the result of concentration of energy from the movement of thousands or millions of cubic kilometers of atmosphere into a vortex in their midst, something a butterfly can have no bearing on. But underground these chains of critical stability are all over the place. Just look at the NEIC's map and see them letting go daily. And each time one lets go, it changes the criticality of another, or of another part of itself.
Fracking certainly could be the causative factor in the initiation of a chain of releases that result in a larger release. The fact that there are smaller quakes means that of course they could be releasing the crack to bear on a major sticking point with more force than before, and certainly could lead to a larger quake.
Any seismologist who discounts this possibility is suspect.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2008/06/top-5-ways-that/
As close i got get on short notice. I posted this two years ago IIRC
I am or was a petroleum engineer, and I can tell you that yes it's entirely possible for subsurface oil and gas operations to affect fault lines and cause seismic events like those described.
With that being said, I think there is also a lot of FUD surrounding the practice of fracing. Fracing is not particularly new to the Oil and Gas industry, and there are a lot of Oil and Gas operations that cause environmental and seismic problems, not just fracing.
I feel like people have sort of jumped on to this Fracing thing, because of the "Gasland" documentary. And now they have some "evil" practice to blame the Oil and Gas companies for, but in reality I think it is a little more complicated than that. We have found trillions of cubic feet of natural gas reserves that can be released through fracing, and this has a major implications for domestic energy production and the US economy.
Your argument (and that of many other commenters in this thread) would make sense if all earthquakes were caused by slip-fault activity and are therefore unavoidable/inevitable so long as there is tension between plates. That is simply not the case. It is perfectly possible (but no one really knows) that the process used in hydraulic fracturing (a lot easier of a term to use with a straight face than 'Fracking') is altering the crust in a way nothing else would, and hence is generating earthquakes that otherwise would never have existed in the first place.
I lived in Oklahoma and worked in the natural gas industry circa 2005. At that point we were already frac'ing every single natural gas well we drilled, and probably had been for a decade prior. Why NOW is it suddenly a problem? Oh that's right...because its a politcal issue. If there was any real science to support this frac=quake BS siesmologists would have been screaming about it a decade ago.
I live in Northwestern Oklahoma, and currently work for a Oil and Natural Gas company who not only supplies but regularly uses fracking equipment. At present there are over 300 wells in northwestern Oklahoma that have been fracked in the past 2 years, and yet northwest Oklahoma has seen absolutely no change in seismic activity. And yes fracking is the standard in the US for natural gas well production, and has been for at least 6 years. Thank you for being sensible and knowledgeable on the subject, so few are on here.
Well all I can give is my little anecdote, but I have a friend that develops models and presentations for the NG wildcatters in Northwest AR and the map he showed me made me think Frakking? not such a good idea. He laid out a map on the screen of every place the bunch he had been working for was frakking then he laid over it a map from the local college's seismographic monitoring stations and what they had picked up and every single site they frakked had 2.8 or better earthquakes within 6 months of the start of frakking. And the area they were frakking is solid bedrock and shale, it just doesn't get earthquakes. he showed me the recorded data of that area going back to 1947 (when the college first started monitoring and collecting data) and they averaged maybe one a decade, now it is closer to one a month!
Frankly if the wildcatters elsewhere are like the ones here We, the People will get stuck cleaning up their messes anyway as they have a nice scam going. they have a shell corp set up which they lease ALL the assets from, from mineral rights to drilling equipment, right down to the office furniture. They hit a couple of dry wells or make a mess and the bills start piling up? They just burn the original corp by filing bankruptcy and make a new corp to lease the equipment from. I've already seen a couple pull that scam locally and skip town owing quite a large sum of money.
So as usual in the Corporate States of Amerika whether it turns out to be frakking or not it doesn't matter, as i'm sure by the time they get done we'll have several nice ecological messes that we the taxpayer gets to pick up the tab for while they cash out and move on to the next scam.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.