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Earthquakes That May Be Related To Fracking Close Ohio Oil Well
Frosty P writes "State leaders have ordered that four fluid-injection wells ('fracking') in eastern Ohio will be indefinitely prohibited from opening in the aftermath of heightened seismic activity in the area, an official said. A 4.0-magnitude quake struck Saturday afternoon near several wells that use 'fracking' to release oil deposits. It was the 11th in a series of minor earthquakes in the area."
.... fragile and precarious victory of common sense over big money. Fragile and precarious, yet a victory.
Religous speak to God. Insane are spoken to by God. When all shut up, one can finally hear Shostakovich in peace
And now the goals, for anti-fracking advocates, are:
(1) to identify features in this area's geology that appear contributive to the earthquakes. To wit:
"Dr. Won-Young Kim, one of the Columbia University experts asked by the state to examine possible connections between fracking and seismic activity, said that a problem could arise if fluid moves through the ground and affects 'a weak fault, waiting to be triggered.'"
(2) start fear-mongering re "weak fault[s], waiting to be triggered" a la doomsday flicks, since obviously carcinogens leeching to the water supply aren't sufficiently frightening; maybe sudden catastrophe is more convincing than a slow wasting.
Won't be long now till someone discovers that fracking might help turning the Big One pending into several minor quakes, and starts selling this idea.
This is a sensible response. If the current fracking program is affecting the local geology in this way then the fracking program should be changed.
This isn't news.
Don't be under the impression that this is news. The oil industry has been fracking for years. Decades even. Thus far the middle east and texas have failed spectacularly to fall into the sea.
Move along. Nothing to see here...
Just sayin'.
Wouldn't it be better to have lots of small earthquakes instead of the the large one that would be building up on it's own?
Fraking itself doesn't cause the earthquake, but instead triggers one from the already existing pressures.
The media keeps mixing and confusing fracking with saltwater disposal wells. (remember how much they confuse hackers and crackers)
Fracking is a one time process for increasing porosity of a formation immediately around the well at the time of completion.
A saltwater disposal well is normally a well(oil or gas) that has played out and is used to return unwanted saltwater back where it came from.
Fracking only affects an area within a few hundred feet of the well.
Anyone have that graph handy?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
aren't weak faults the cracks which duct the cocktail into the water table?
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
that when dems stopped the drilling in the gulf due to a massive oil spill, that the dems were blamed for impeding progress and destroying America, but now that a republicans gets a few tremors in his state, he wants to stop it quickly? Likewise, here in Colorado, the cities that have republicans in control have put temp stops to fracking in THEIR areas, calling it prudent, yet want us to continue fracking all over, importing oils from places like Nigeria, Iran, Venezeula, etc. and absolutely are opposed to spending money on electric cars?
And ppl do not understand why I WANT us to continue drilling all over USA. I figure that once Americans start to get earthquakes, polluted waters esp. in our aquifiers, and see the repercussions of this 'clean' source of jobs, then MAYBE, JUST MAYBE, we will finally figure out that we need to change our policy. And I can not think of anything that would be better then to get the west off imported energy (other than to add that we quit importing bad goods and food from china).
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
"Common sense" in your case, apparently means "hysteria over things I don't understand, but still don't like."
There was a 12k foot well dug in the 60's at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside of Denver for the purposes of chemical waste disposal. They pumped down 150 million gallons of waste until the mid 60's. They stopped because over a thousand small earthquakes started occurring, including several that could be felt, up to 5.3.
I can understand not wanting carcinogens pumped into the water table, but the earthquake aspect seems like a non-issue to me as long as they're small. If small earthquakes are triggered, it means stresses in the fault lines were already present and are being relieved. Having a number of small earthquakes seems preferable to letting the stress build up until it triggers a large quake.
The article itself notes that earthquakes have occurred in that part of Ohio for nearly two centuries, and its size was well beyond the quite small theoretical maximum that could be induced by fracking. Extensive studies of fracking have shown no evidence of the contamination scare stories environmentalists have been pushing.
The people opposing fracking are the same people opposed to all uses of oil and as power sources.
Lawrence Person (lawrencepersonh@gmailh.com (remove all "h"s to mail)
http://www.lawrenceperson.com/
Alas.
FTFA:
Then on Saturday, a magnitude 4.0 earthquake struck that released at least 40 times more energy than any of the previous 10 or more tremors that had rattled the region in 2011.
So all we need to do is to learn how to turn earthquake energy into electric power. Pumping fracking juice into the earth to purposely cause earthquakes could solve all our energy problems.
We've been doing it wrong all along: we've been pumping stuff out for energy, instead of pumping it in.
It might kinda suck for folks who live along fault lines, but with energy, you always have a "not in my backyard" crowd to deal with.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
I'm sorry, I know there's loads of serious comments that are worthier than this, but my inner Battlestar Galactica makes an entirely different subject out of that title. That's a fracking close Ohio oil well!
Consider this post the steam vent for everyone else who needs to get it out of their system.
It might be pronounced differently(is it?) but everytime I read fracking I think of Battlestar and this subject it's funny;
Earthquakes That May be Realted To F*cking close Ohion Oil Well.
Love it :)
It would be revolutionary if you could trigger earthquakes. And if you can intentionally have smaller ones vs bigger ones even better. If it's true then we serious need Ohio to continue and seriously study the phenomenon. To where your fracking where there are no oil wells just to see if you can get results. This would save lives.
And it's a hard argument to say that pumping water at relatively low pressures and total energies (compared to what exists already) is actually causing earthquakes. That would be a thousand times more revolutionary. The energies involved in earthquakes are nuclear on an exponential scale.
Either way for the sake of humanity we need them to continue.
The earth is porous and cavernous, yet filled with fluid similar to a wet sponge. If you bust up the caverns and suck out the fluid, the ground is going to collapse.
If the oil/gas were in large, cavernous holes in the ground, there'd be no need to frac. It's not. It's in the tiny pores in the rock.
It depends on whether or not the natural gas bearing material is lower than the water table or not. Fracking involves injection of liquids (compounds that are not usually identified) below the water table with other layers of material that supposedly prevents "ducting" or diffusion of bad compounds into the water table. However a "leaking" tube used for injection can cause contamination of the water table.
The world is still here and it was *not* the first post.
If everything seems to be going fine at an injection well, the waste is flowing and there are no visible problems on the surface, how is it determined if the pipe through which the waste water is being pumped did or didn't leak before the waste got to the desired depth?
My parents had "free gas", because the oil well in the front 40 (acres) was a constant, if slow, producer of both oil and gas.
Eastern Ohio has had oil wells for at least the last century. They are typically slow producers, but the crude they produce is relatively highly prized because its impurities are less nasty than others. I don't know the terminology very well, but I recall that there was a lot of paraffin and other "nice" stuff in Ohio oil.
Throughout my childhood and youth, arriving home after a long trip always a pleasant experience, because I could recognize the whiff of oil in the air as we got closer to the area where we lived: North of Somerset, south of Brownsville, east of Glenford).
The gas got a whole lot less "free" when my father insisted that *I* be the one to empty the sumps where the white gas (liquid at room temperature) would condense out of the gas (mostly methane, which is the genuine article) in the middle of winter after the furnace stopped...
Sorry, the east coast of the US isn't geographically stable. You have to go to the Michigan Basin or Canadian Shield to find big areas that are.
That's why the oil and gas is there, faults and deformation form traps for it.
Your potential grief bond proposal is interesting from a legal standpoint. How much potential grief is someone causing me by blocking someone else drilling for energy I might use? Should they have to post a bond with their legal attempts to someone from drilling for that reason, too?
I feel grief...
Republican Politicians in Ohio are wondering where fossil fuels come from in the first place as the 6000 years since the flood clearly hasn't been long enough for them to form from natural processes.
I'm guessing that the study of the quakelets in the area will result in permission to go ahead and keep going at it. This is a temporary condition. In my opinion, when something happens that was not forecast, then it's a good time to check things out before going whole-hog.
I also lived in an area where there's well activity, and in fact my parents' well was fracked sometime in the late '70's.
Our well water SUCKED SHIT afterward. We had to give up on the well water entirely, and were very fortunate to have a slow and barely acceptable artesian spring that allowed us to continue living on the farm. My father was a software engineer and was (barely) able to afford the cost of all the digging, the cistern, and semi-big-deal plumbing that was needed to get non-shit water.
I've been there to watch the process in our neck of the woods and there is a whole FUCKLOAD of externalizing risk going on. The people it affects tend to live on relatively slim incomes as it is, and often the effects of nearby industrial processes take them from just making it to just not making it.
So there's no free lunch. Particularly if you don't have the money to buy a congressliar.
To those saying that earthquakes here are common, I live in Youngstown, and we have never had a locally originated seismic event. But as of March, we've had 11 quakes with epicenters near the well that has been shut down.
The education system in California is highly funded.
The per student spending is high. The problem is that we can not fire bad teachers and too much of the money is spent on "Administration".
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
Fracking fluid consists of nothing but clay? Then why the big list of secret proprietary ingredients?
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
Fluid pore pressure at faults is known to change their ability to slip. I think the question is, do small changes cause the asperities - the "stuck" areas of a fault - to change probabilities of slipping by much.
And how much depends on small changes in initial conditions. The butterfly effect means your pissing in the hurricane does change the direction of them next year.
They have been fracking in Michigan for over 20 years and the only problems have been near home with poorly constructed wells. As for the contamination from drilling fluid, people need to realize that the same drilling fluid is used to drill your homes well. The material consists of pulverized dry clay, if it's a carcinogen then you shouldn't let your kids play in the sand box or with modeling clay. And yes I used to drill for a living at a geotechnical engineering company.
So the complicated proprietary mix of chemicals that drilling companies have spent millions of dollars on legal/lobbying efforts to keep secret, is actually just "pulverized dry clay"? And you just blurted out this proprietary secret on an Internet discussion forum?
I think this is where the Reader pauses to apply the believability test.
Hollywood, Television, has become the dream machine. We need to take that back; each of us is a Dream Machine
I've got caviar stuck in my braces!
I really don't understand why someone like yourself - a person who lives in splendor undreamt of by most humans who ever lived - is unwilling to contribute to your community's well-being when that community is clearly in need.
Now, if you said "I don't think I should pay more taxes than people with ten times my wealth" I'd totally agree with you. But that's not what you said.
If you said "I don't want to pay for invading other countries and subsidizing rich bankster's lifestyles" I could understand that too. But you didn't say that either.
As I see it, you're wealthy enough to own stock, but you don't want to pay for the system that makes your wealth possible. Somebody's got to pay for it, but you want it to be someone else. You have enormous wealth and enjoy many privileges, yet you honestly think you're being oppressed. You personify our economic problem; you're barely one step above a welfare queen.
Ohio was once a major location of oil drilling, including the original home of a little company called Standard Oil. According to the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, they currently are pumping out something like 14,000 barrels a day.
I am officially gone from
The pressure it takes to pump into the well should tell you how far down you're pumping. Additionally, the pipe is pressure tested prior to shooting holes at the desired depths. Really, that's not the difficult parts. The problem you're thinking of would more likely occur via water channeling back up the outside of the pipe due to improper cement placement. That one's a bit more difficult to prove. The easiest way would be radioactive tracers, although I don't see that flying with the environmental crowd. You might be able to use a temperature log, but it would be hard to distinguish between different causes.
It has been proven that not including your pissing into that hurricane in the calculations would make predicting that path (I specified next year's hurricane) using a simulated model impossible.
I don't know if this qualifies as proof of the effect itself.
The pilot of that cruise ship deliberately applies negative feedback to cancel any effect of that fly landing on his nose and distracting him into moving the rudder.
GP said the drilling fluid is pulverized dry clay. The complicated proprietary mix of chemicals is frac water.
I think this is where the Reader pauses to apply the reading comprehension test.
Right but that's likely assuming EXACT accuracy in the path.
I mean if the total deviation because of the pissing were .00000000001 nano meters then sure. You'll need to account for the piss to reach that level of specificity but really it's hard to say that doing so significantly impacted that hurricane.
By the same token, a fly hitting a cruise ship by newton's laws of motion must have SOME effect on the cruise ship. But given the differentials in mass to say nothing of the thrust from the engines, rocking of the waves, and whatever course corrections from the captain... it's just not going to matter.
The crux of my question here was whether injecting that water into the ground were SIGNIFICANT. You can say everything effects everything but by that logic the earth moves a little when I jump up and down. It does move a little. It's just so little that it might as well not move at all. You'll never detect that movement it's so small.
The amount of mass of all the earth for lets say a hundred square miles is monstrous. It's a HUGE mass. The amount of water pumped into the ground was doubtless a lot in human terms but in geological terms... they'd have to divert RIVERS into the ground. Probably the Mississippi. And even then it's anyone's guess.
I say this as a complete novice. I can't claim special knowledge. It just strains credulity to say that such a relatively small amount of water would have such a colossal effect on such a scale. It's completely out of proportion.
Am I a complete moron for thinking this? I'm honestly doing my best to think this through here. It just seems really really unlikely.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
You typically do either static pressure testing and / or one of several other methods to look at cement integrity. There is a whole industry around this. You can read one of the many articles on the Macando blowout to see how not to do it.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
We also know that fracking poisons the water by dumping 254 chemicals into the ground that find their way to the water table.
Wow... That's a lot of chemicals. Can you name them all? :D
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
~ We've got gas explosions erupting from Sandusky all the way to Portsmouth!
~ We're talking about tectonic plates being pushed up higher than the Himalayas in a matter of minutes!
~ Looks like Ohio really will be high in the middle...
MegaFrack! 10.5 Starring Lucy Lawless, Erik Estrada, and Stacy Keatch. Only on SyFy!
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
I'm quite aware of how to do a cement pressure test. If you'll note, I even said they pressure test. However, that pressure test will only tell you if the shoe holds. It won't tell you whether or not you have a microannulus behind the casing that you could hook up with after perforating.
Although I have no excuse for why I totally forgot about the existence of RCBL/VDL logs.
...and we've had 11 earthquakes of 2.0 magnitude or greater since March 17, 2011. Normally, we're lucky to get one earthquake a year.
Local news source
Fracking has already been linked as the most likely cause of earthquakes in and around the seaside town of Blackpool. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-15550458.
You can sign up here. No guarantees you will always be schilling Slashdot, and the pay isn't really that great. Also, you'll apparently spend more of your time schilling if you sign up on this one. The barrier to entry is high for a non-Chinese native, though.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
.... a catastrophe as punishment.
Losing an aquifer to fracking would be a dandy.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Quiet, Cletus.
-- This space for lease, low setup fee, inquire within!
If you eat at an expensive restaraunt, you can't complain you shouldn't have to pay for dessert because you already paid $100 for the entree and drinks, and you "thought you paid enough thank you very much".
Clearly, the government does not have enough money to pay its bills. Clearly, borrowing at the rate we have been is at best a stopgap solution. Somewhat less clearly, but still pretty obvious, the gap is too big to close by reducing spending; the deep cuts required would cut into the government's ability to pay for things almost everyone agrees are required.
The obvious conclusion is that taxes are not too high. They're too low.
This does not necessarily mean your taxes specifically are too low. But given the size of this pit, asking only some of us to fill it in doesn't seem right. Taxes need to be raised, and before you ask - yes, I am calling for my own taxes to be raised.
Funny, when I read "fracking poisons the water by dumping 254 chemicals into the ground", my first thought (being a computer geek) was that they were obviously using some very old computer equipment, or for some unstated reason were storing the number as an 8-bit signed integer (char for us C programmers). This would explain the number, since when they attempted to add one more to the list, the software reported that -1 chemicals were in the list. This couldn't be right, so they stopped the testing with the last one that the software could handle properly. Then someone else came along and reported that 254 as the total number.
Then, of course, I decided that this was just me being overly silly. But now I'm not so sure. When you see overly-precise looking numbers, and they're "magic" numbers in their binary representation, there's a really good chance that they did come about due to some specific software hiccup that's an artifact of the binary representation.
Anyone know where that 254 actually came from? It is actually the right number, in any sense of "right"? It's just too suspicious to be accepted as real in a computer-geek environment.
Those who do study history are doomed to stand helplessly by while everyone else repeats it.
Actually it is up to 750 different chemicals rather than list them all read the report http://democrats.energycommerce.house.gov/sites/default/files/documents/Hydraulic%20Fracturing%20Report%204.18.11.pdf.
Of course the biggest problem with fracking and earthquakes is, you are creating new fractures and obviously new avenues for the under pressure fracking liquids and the targeted fossil fuel gasses to mix with the ground water as well as leaking to atmosphere.
Keep in mind those escaping fracking fluids will also pick up any other contaminant material as they migrate to the aquifers people are targeting for fresh water sources. It is easy to see now why Darth Cheney gave the fracking industry a blanket poison everyone you wish escape clause, the sick bastard.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
You're talking about ONE economic theory out there, which is highly dubious in nature and VERY risky to implement, in case it turns out to be wrong.
Absolutely, our nation has a problem because we're spending money we can't afford to spend on things like war. But the idea that we need more and larger stimulus efforts to "kick-start" the economy back into action? I don't really believe it. The big problem with the concept is that we've got to borrow from other nations to even have the money to give out in a stimulus. That means not only does the (hopefully) recovering economy have to do well enough to pay all of that money back, but they've got to do it PLUS interest, AND in an environment where there's tougher competition with other nations of the world who upgraded their infrastructure and manufacturing capabilities with all of that money they borrowed from the U.S.
Besides, the stimulus spending winds up "playing favorites" with people who have enough political clout to ensure their pet business interests receive the lion's share of the money.
The alternate suggestion of promoting new, small business startups sounds like a much better long-term solution to me. Instead of people finding themselves unemployed for long stretches of time, collecting govt. assistance as they search and often settle for "under-employment"? They could be encouraged to start their own new businesses, which should lead to eventual generation of more job openings that would be the type suitable to be filled by others like themselves (who perhaps started their own small businesses too, but weren't real successful with them, or found it wasn't their thing after they gave it an honest try).
Rounds of stimulus payouts will make more people happy in the short-term, but is likely to be a plan that implodes in the long haul.
No, can you?
“Constituents of fracking fluids are often considered ‘trade secrets’ and not revealed. Even regulators are left in the dark,” she says.
...
The ones we were able to identify concerned us because of their significant potential to cause damage to the environment and human health. Some were linked with cancer and birth defects, while others damaged the hormone system...
See here for a US scenario:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45658085/ns/us_news-environment/t/colorado-requires-disclosure-fracking-chemicals/#.TwKaVtSyYgw
Never said I could. It was a joke, cupcake, calm down.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
Let's see a comparison of the People's trust of our "Elected" Leaders versus our self-appointed Federal Reserve Board.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
"We don't know what the secret ingredient is, but since we got into the Fracking business we don't seem to be paying as much to dispose of our Hazardous Waste."
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
Over what time frame? Citation needed, because I'm aware of no place in the US where per student education funding is lower than it was10 years ago.
"Pulling together is the aim of despotism and tyranny! Free men pull in all sorts of directions" -- Havelock Vetinari
How I read it: earthquakes may be cause by an Ohio oil well that needed to be further the frack away from... something?
I just figured one bit of unfalsifiable twaddle deserved an equal and opposite bit of unfalsifiable twaddle.
Well stated. Sir Fig Newton's Third Law of Promotion.
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
Wait... so you do support stimulus? (Promoting small business start-ups is stimulus.) The parent never said the stimulus should be a cash payout.
But not anywhere near 52.9% over-all. You're not being honest. Your effective tax rate would be quite a bit lower.
It would need to be done carefully though. Releasing tension in one area could cause a unstable increase in tension in a previously stable area. You wouldn't be able to just drill and frack willy nilly.