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USGS Suggests Connection Between Seismic Activity and Fracking
First time accepted submitter samazon writes "According to a recently proposed abstract by the United States Geological Survey, hydraulic fracturing, or more specifically the disposal of fracking wastewater, may be directly correlated to the increase in seismic activity in the midwest. Results of the paper will be presented on April 18th, but the language of the abstract seems to imply that there is a connection. After years of controversy regarding hydrofracking including ground water contamination and disclosure of chemical solutions, the results of the study, if conclusive, could influence the cost of natural gas due to increased regulations on wastewater disposal." The actual language of the abstract leaves a fair amount of wiggle room: "While the seismicity rate changes described here are almost certainly manmade, it remains to be determined how they are related to either changes in extraction methodologies or the rate of oil and gas production."
Another reason for some people to reinforce their belief that science is anti-business and that scientists should be dismissed, if not stopped.
That would obviously be quite a breakthrough if it could be made repeatable.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
They attributed quakes to Zeus and Hera fracking.
In Oklahoma, the rate of M >= 3 events abruptly increased in 2009 from 1.2/year in the previous half-century to over 25/year. This rate increase is exclusive of the November 2011 M 5.6 earthquake and its aftershocks.
A twenty-five-fold increase, that excludes the largest outlying event, in the number of earthquakes would seem to be statistically significant of something.
I got a catholic block.
... but can't yet prove causation. Still, the correlation is significant enough to justify significant caution in the continued use of fracking, and to merit further study on causation. As others have noted, this has the potential to be useful geoengineering, but like many discoveries, it has the potential to be very dangerous. A healthy dose of caution is warranted.
make imaginary.friends COUNT=100 VISIBLE=false
Hydralic fracturing has been applied in many setting since hte late 1940s. Much research, by USGS, BLM et al. in the 1970s established induced seismic activity associated with drilling-mining hydralic fracting activities.
The trouble with the current "enlightned" study is a lack of knowledge of how to search bookstacks, those in a Library, to find the printed USGS bullitens, circulars and research papers since they have not been scanned, parsed and made searchabel by electronic database search technologies.
Thus the Lost Discoveries of Hydralic Fracturing awaite re-discovery by our fearless intrepid internaughts.
The earthquakes are all minor but groundwater being poisoned in areas without back up supplies is serious. They keep talking about how there's a layer of rock protecting the groundwater but the fracking shatters that layer of protective rock. It's hard to argue with tap water being flammable. Great we get 10 to 30 years of natural gas and the residents get to shower with bottled water for the next few hundred years. Some of the chemicals used are cancer causing so guess who gets stuck with that bill? Not the gas companies. If it's safe prove it's safe before you frack half the country. This got rammed through with zero oversight. Everyone can say who cares about the midwest but guess what that's where much of your food is grown. Also one of the hottest ares for potentially fracking is the very place New York City gets much of it's water from. Cheap gas may end up as very expensive water. This is about the rich getting richer, period. They were already getting plenty of gas out of the fields this is about getting 3X to 4X as much thus increasing profits. Who gets stuck with the environmental costs in the end? The tax payers. Which do we need more, water or natural gas? Well you can't raise corn and wheat or drink natural gas so I have to come down on the side of water. The gas companies don't care about groundwater because they make their money off gas and not groundwater. If they could charge a $100 a barrel for groundwater it'd be a very different story.
IIRC, two thirds of those quakes were within a half mile of drilling sites. Seems significant to me, anyway.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
How exactly is a relatively small amount of water being pumped into the ground supposed to destabilize TECTONIC PLATES...
Except no one has ever claimed that it will destabilize plates, since earthquakes can occur for thousands of other reasons that don't directly involve plates. There are still earth quakes in the central continent caused by the lack of glacial pressure, there are earth quakes caused by hot spots, there are earth quakes caused by compression pressures, there are... you get the point. There are areas of the continent completely peppered with faults, far from the nearest plate boundary, this includes vast swaths of Arizona, Nevada, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, this is due to compression and expansion, this causes the "basin and range" effect that defines their geography. There are huge amounts of faults in the middle of the old continental core caused by glaciation, and the easing of pressure. Areas are dying lakes generally have tons of faults, for the same reasons. If you Googled a fault map of the US, you'd noticed that we're pretty much completely covered in them, everywhere.
Fracking in increasing the local pressure, which can jar, or lubricate existent faults. This can lead to localized disturbances.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
Every rigorous study funded by whom? Remember when every rigorous study of smoking showed that it was perfectly safe?
You seem immediately ready to disregard THIS particular study that might go against what are most likely industry funded studies that show that fracking is safe.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
As opposed to what - the problem is solved, so let's decrease funding? The science is settled, so let's not study this anymore?
I swear, some people sound like they think everything should be funded via unicorn farts and rainbows. Yes, research costs money. Pay up, or end up in the dark ages. Of course, if that does happen, you'll find someone or something else to blame but your own shortsighted smugness that automatically equates every human endeavor with your own base motivation: more money.
Insightful my ass.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
And this is exactly why scientists study things - because a gut feeling is not the same as data, no matter how much you'd like to believe that.
Fortunately for us, there are people willing to take your ridicule and ask obvious questions, with the idea that the answer might not be nearly as obvious as anyone thought.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Are you retarded? You're clever enough to realise "it's fucking obvious" but not enough to realise that "it's fucking obvious" is only the first step of the scientific method, and has been wrong many, many times (do you need examples of "common knowledge" and "common sense" that have been wrong?).
You reckon enough has been studied, but in terms of outcomes there's a big difference between reservoir depletion causing earthquakes, and fracking causing earthquakes. One is a complete cessation of extraction, and the other is a change of method.
IIRC, two thirds of those quakes were within a half mile of drilling sites. Seems significant to me, anyway.
I know "correlation is not causation" and all that, but... I dunno, can this be an exception to the rule?
I think we can safely say that fracking is *somehow* involved in the increase. Even if it's just in this small area, it shows that it is possible and it warrants more investigation.
Why do I have the bad feeling that in the next 10-20 years we're gonna have something like Deepwater Horizon, but it's gonna be on land? Some poor little podunk town that never has earthquakes is gonna be shaken to bits because of fracking.
Random Thoughts From A Diseased Mind (Not For Dummies)
By seismic event I guess you mean they picked up something on the scales? Or you read about it on the news, not something you actually experienced? (and note fraking has been going on since 1947, so sure it's not something you've cared about in your lifetime until now that it is a news item)
You're still talking about an absurd amount of mass that is supposedly being moved by a relatively tiny amount of water. It would be like saying you could destabilize a boulder with a child's water pistol. Only even then the ratio is wrong. The masses we're talking about are vastly larger in ratio then that.
I mean lets just do a simple mas relationship. How many megatons is all the earth involved in one of these supposed quakes? Okay, and how many tons of water is pumped into the ground during one of these operations.
I'd be shocked if it were within ten million to ONE.
I'm not a geologist. I just don't see how such a relatively tiny amount of mass can effect a relatively huge mass unless the huge mass ALREADY unstable. And if it's already unstable then the fracking isn't causing the quake so much as triggering something now that would have happened later.
Furthermore, what sort of damage have we suffered so far from fracking related quakes? Any cities leveled? Seriously, can we show any damage what so ever from it? Or are people saying that it shook their house for a couple seconds once when the pump across the street turned on. Because I can believe that. Of course, a large truck driving by will have a similar effect.
Look, the people bitching about fracking are looking for a problem. They want a problem. They don't care if there is a problem in fact, they just don't like fracking because this has gotten political. The Michael Moore people got all hot and bothered about it and now swarms of idiots are attacking it despite the fact that it's doing great things for the US energy market.
Right now natural gas prices are dirt cheap because of fracking. People are heating their homes and paying their utilities less because of fracking. Fracking is killing the coal industry because natural gas is now cheaper then coal. And do you know how much natural gas we have? So much that we can keep burning it without moderation for hundreds if not thousands of years.
So if you have an argument against fracking... make it good. Because it needs to be REALLY good to matter at all.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
Correlation (if it is real), does imply causation, it just doesn't tell you the source or direction of the cause.
Hi, I'm posting from the soviet republic of France, guided by the Great and Beloved Leader Nicolas Sarkozy, friend of your former socialist président George Bush. Here, we are fighting against fracking for a couple of years. Of course, we rely on brave american activists for our information, cause your still ahead of us in terms of pollution and destructing environment, but it's even better when scientists bring their share.
You seem to bei neither. Because you willfully ignore that any attempt to prove that climate scientists committed fraud resulted into nothing. Not a single instance of fraud! Despite lots of accusations and investigations, still no evidence of fraud. Instead every project so far to independently gather the data, analyze them and then prove the climate theories wrong (as a scientist would do it), resulted in the same predictions the climate scientists already made.
But instead of being a scientist and accepting the facts and thus thinking that the climate science might under certain circumstances have some valid claims, you continue to spread baseless claims of fraud.
So, whatever you are, you are not a scientist.
I got to watch a very interesting lecture on this a month ago, so I'll chime in. Oh, you should cite something for your first claim, otherwise you're playing the "no true Scotsman" game.
For one, what was known as "fracking" up to very recently was done using straight wells, as in drilled straight down. Part of the reason these natural gas deposits haven't been exploited is that most shale (where the gas is locked in) is in very thin, very wide (ranging over hundreds to thousands of miles) formations. A vertical well only works if the shale is deep, which is a lot less common. Today's fracking is done by drilling down into a thin shale formation, then twisting the bit 90 degrees and drilling sideways a great distance. You then inject a fluid (mostly water and extremely finely ground silica, from northern glacial sand deposits) which, as I understood it, uses a combination of friction and pressure to cause micro-fracturing (fracking) all along the hole. Methane trapped in the shale flows via these fractures into the well, which at that point you just need to cap off and begin to process. Its incredible technology.
Anyway, back to your arguments (and those of a couple others). A large horizontal hole in the upper crust, purposefully cracked along its length, extracting large amounts of gas from the surrounding stone is absolutely changing the balance of crustal forces in that region. "But its only a little hole, and rock is big and heavy!" Its a system in close to perfect equilibrium, and we are altering it. A single shovelfull of earth can cause a mudslide, if the system is in balance. I see how it can be confusing, but fracking is probably causing some earthquakes.
And for those saying "who cares about Oklahoma," you should know that the largest shale region in the United States forms roughly a triangle with New Jersey, Pensylvaina (or was it Ohio... grab a geologic map if you care), and the Carolinas as the points. There are also good spots in other parts of the South. But my focus here is that New York is on top of this shale, as are many other major east-coast cities. The numbers for how great natural gas can be (because the US potentially has so much of it) are assuming the exploitation of the East-coast reserves. They might start in Oklahoma and the Dakotas, but it will come to your door very soon.
All that said, it still might not be dangerous. If you can find some way to reasonably quantify the damage from small earthquakes and have it paid for via a small tax on the producers (property devaluation would be trickier...) it could still be exploitable. What worries me more is that the fluid being used almost certainly has small amounts of something unpleasant in it, as if it didn't the fight over keeping the formula secret wouldn't be nearly this vicious. Also, methane leaking into the aquifer thats above the shale is a real concern. In theory, fracking is perfectly safe because you can seal the hole with a liner and cap, essentially re-plugging it and isolating the aquifer again (which the rock formation itself has done for eons, else there wouldn't be a lot of gas down there). But what happens when you increase the number of earthquakes in the region by over an order of magnitude? Do those caps stay in place? If no, then there is a real issue that needs to be resolved here.