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Earthquakes Correlated With Texan Fracking Sites
eldavojohn writes "A recent peer reviewed paper and survey by Cliff Frohlich of the University of Texas' Institute for Geophysics reveals a correlation between an increase in earthquakes and the emergence of fracking sites in the Barnett Shale, Texas. To clarify, it is not the actual act of hydrofracking that induces earthquakes, but more likely the final process of injecting wastewater into the site, according to Oliver Boyd, a USGS seismologist. Boyd said, 'Most, if not all, geophysicists expect induced earthquakes to be more likely from wastewater injection rather than hydrofracking. This is because the wastewater injection tends to occur at greater depth, where earthquakes are more likely to nucleate. I also agree [with Frohlich] that induced earthquakes are likely to persist for some time (months to years) after wastewater injection has ceased.' Frohlich added, 'Faults are everywhere. A lot of them are stuck, but if you pump water in there, it reduces friction and the fault slips a little. I can't prove that that's what happened, but it's a plausible explanation.' In the U.S. alone this correlation has been noted several times."
For a minute there I thought this was a gratuitous shot at The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas.
I'm not defending fracking, per se, isn't it better to have a bunch of small earthquakes than one big one?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
They can use natural gas generators until FEMA shows up.
We've been here before I'm sure!
Have any of these earthquakes caused any significant damage? If they were going to happen anyway due to fault stress maybe it's better to induce them early when they will be weaker.
Correlation is not causation! Oops, I read you're not supposed to say that anymore.
Reservoirs are associated with earthquakes too.
Frackin' A!
This was the same thought I had - better to have the fault slip now when it's a barely feelable ~3.0 than to have it work it's way up to a 6.
Then again, maybe the little slips put more pressure on different areas, and might make the 'big one' more likely.
It'd be something for scientists to work out on supercomputers. Maybe we'll deliberately inject wastewater to trigger that 6.0 before it builds up to that 8-9.
I don't read AC A human right
Obviously it is the increase in earthquakes that is causing the fracking. Just look at the correlation!
Oh please, they could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that fracking, or some part of its process, causes earthquakes, there won't be the slightest change in procedure. After all, that oil's not going to sell itself sitting in the ground there.
Does money ride on an action being taken? If yes, it's absolutely irrelevant what the effects are of it being done, it's going to be done.
There was a MUCH stronger association between employment and fracking sites.
The Japanese better watch out, After last years quake its clearly only a matter of time before they end up with the worlds largest fracking plant in their back yard
lets bring in "Most Likely" into the mix. No need to have proof anymore when you're waging an energy war. Meanwhile, lets also complain about the high price of gas.
We have a potential means for re-introducing tectonic activity on Venus and Mars if we want!
Clearly, if we were just allowed to dump wastewater into local rivers and streams, none of these earthquakes would have had to happen. Why are environmentalists objectively pro-earthquake?
> What is rule #1 in statistics? "Correlation does not equal causality."
Yes, you do fail stats.
When a man-made event clearly proceeds some other event, then correlation does imply causation. This is the entire basis of experimental science.
Unless you can show that the earthquakes in the future are somehow causing fracking in the past, then it is causation. If that's the case, then I'm sure there are a couple of Nobel Prizes in it for your discovery of time-travel.
Mod parent up.
What happened to earth having a fragile ecosystem?
Why is the search for oil so important, that we will risk destroying parts of this fragile ecosystem just to get more?
How much corporate greed are we going to allow before we say enough?
Be seeing you...
It must be true...Ian Fleming thought it up! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_View_to_a_Kill
As long as they feel that they can either profit personally, or get away with not having to pay for the damage they've caused, people like the parent will whore for any group out there.
Couldn't they just inject some kind of glue with the wastewater? Problem solved.
When A is correlated with B, there are 3 possibilities. A causes B, B causes A, or both B and A are caused by a third factor C.
So are you claiming that earthquakes cause fracking? Or are you claiming that some unknown third factor causes both earthquakes and fracking? If you don't have any plausible suggestions for either, causation seems like the most likely explanation.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
I am Computer Scientist not a Seismologist. But as I understand it getting the input data that described the pressures on the faults for modelling Is not a simple task. In general releasing pressure on a fault line in a controlled manner is a good thing. On the other hand the Goal of fracking is not to reduce earth quakes, its to get natural gas from the ground. Government over sight becomes a political issue and we know where government officials get there money. So we are going to have to hope for the best.
That if I take a jack hammer to my home's foundation, it may make it less stable? Who would have thought?
The people tagging this story with "correlation is not causation" are a perfect example of what Slate is talking about this week on how silly this meme has become. Ok, so are you saying that the frakking does not cause the earthquakes? What, is it the other way around? No, I'm guessing it's a mythical third factor causing both. Some mystery force is causing both the frakking and the earthquakes. Maybe birds. Who knows? But nothing something correlated!
People, the correlation thing is nice and all, but can we please not forget Occam's rasor? The frakking causing the earthquakes really is the simplest explanation, digging out the correlation argument is just as logical as closing your eyes and singing la-la-la. Proving correlation does not prove causation, but it is a necessary step in doing so, not a logical no-no. Even the scientist quoted in the article is aware of the distinction. There is no "gotcha!" here.
Thank you, Slate. I really had not realized how silly this had become.
Does it not make sense to just look at other instances and reference that? Or does science from around the world and also from the US differ? I thought science was fact and facts are true? Especially by a university, they should have known better considering university students do research into projects. For a grander equivalent example, this is as if I, instead of doing research on Mr Hitler for a university history assignment, built a time machine, went back in time and interviewed him myself. Maybe I'm just too much of a forward thinking hippy hoping that one day we will be a unified planet where we all do and share sciencey stuff together, for the benefit of everyone. Lets face it, the war/science relationship isn't working out too well, back in the old days there was lots of war and death and not much science, but the war and death kept the population down, now we have more of a balanced set up and they are intertwined pretty closely. But this isn't good enough for us really as we're still putting too much effort into the war and death and not enough into friendship and science, and this less amount of war and death means we have a population/resource usage issue to deal with and while war or science can solve it (either by having so many dead that there is enough to go around or that we advance science enough for better usage of resources/find more resources elsewhere). We can't have both at a sustainable amount. When are we going to get our ass in gear and choose one or the other? Hmm, I feel I went a little off topic on this one, AC post it is haha.
They are making a lot of money!! Don't let things like large scale damage to property and possible loss of life or other environmental concerns interfere with their god-given right to make money!
How long was there denial of the connection between smoking and cancer? Money at stake... much denial resulted.
Global warming? Same thing... still going on
A separation of church and state needs to happen... and by church I mean money... that *IS* their god after all.
So, instead of one big quake releasing energy built up over a long time, we have a series of small quakes. This is a good thing.
This case, the "third factor" DOES make sense. Hear me out here.
Natural gas deposits (the reason for the fracking) form from decomposing organic deposits trapped between shale or salt layers. This gas formation creates pressure (the reason for the earthquakes.)
So, the third factor is natural gas deposits.
The incidence of earthquakes will positiviely correlate to natural gas deposits. The incidence of fracking will correlate to natural gas deposits.
The result is a positive correlation between earthquakes and and fracking.
A test of this 3rd factor is easily accomplished, by doing a frack drilling where there is no natural gas as a control. That will provide the needed resolution of causality between fracking and earthquakes.
Clearly geological composition causes both Earthquakes and Fraking.
It's not the fracking, its the wastewater. Simply prevent earthquakes by dumping the wastewater on the ground or the nearest river or kiddie pool. What could possibly go wrong?
Why, oh why, didn't I take the Blue Pill?
I'm not defending fracking
I'm wondering why fracking needs defending the first place... Let's just agree that if it had been named horizontal drilling, nobody would have considered it a threat :)
Is there a chance I'm right about this?
'Faults are everywhere. A lot of them are stuck, but if you pump water in there, it reduces friction and the fault slips a little." So rather than massive earthquakes that result from massive energy releases that are stored in faults for long periods of no slipping, hydro fracking causes semi-continuous slipping resluting in smaller but more frequent earthquakes. I don't know about you, but I would rather have a bunch of small earthquakes than 1 massive one. I don't even know if the claim proposed int the article is true. I am saying that if it is true, the fact that hydro fracking causes earthquakes (not the other possible negative effects) is a good thing.
IANAG, and i'm no fan of fracking for many reasons,
but inducing small earthquakes seems like a good thing to me.
faults build up pressure, and one way or another that pressure is going to release.
it seems better if it releases in smaller, more frequent events than less frequent but large ones.
I mean, they are removing OIL and adding WATER. The WATER is lubricating the rocks and causing them to move ... more than the OIL was?
/sarcasm
I think I'll run out and replace the oil in my Jeep with some good old H2O!! 20 mpg here I come!!!
Don't let things like large scale damage to property and possible loss of life
Can anything more serious than a broken window or busted crockery be attributed to fracking induced quakes? Has anyone in Texas or elsewhere actually died when a 0.6 quake jiggled a seismometer anywhere?
What large scale damage or loss of life are you talking about?
and I haven't felt the earth move once. I'm pretty sure the fracking has something to do with all the quakes around me since they started just a few years ago. Not that I'm defending the drillers but a 3.X earthquake doesn't do a whole lot of damage. Probably why the drillers are still getting away with continued fracking. If we ever get something in the 5.X range then it might raise some eyebrows...
Karma: Bad
You could look at places with natural gas deposits that are not being fracked to see how their earthquake incidence compares to areas without gas deposits.
This is NOT an Insightful comment! You can't "release a stable fault". Faults are active or inactive. Faults can become inactive due to the movements of the tectonic plates that occur slowly over millions of years. They can also become active due to these same slow processes. But 'lubing' an inactive fault will NOT cause it to suddenly start moving again. The tremendous forces exerted by our earth's mantle on the crust above it dwarf the force of friction that can be found between the surfaces of the fault. If the fault line is experiencing any force in opposing directions, then the fault will slip at some point. Some active faults take thousands of years to build up enough force to slip. But eventually, they WILL slip!
Uh, you're forgetting the rather important fourth possibility, that the correlation is entirely spurious.
Earthquakes cause fracking? That's new to me!
Earthquakes from natural gas do occur, and have been recorded from pre-fracking periods. The phenomenon has already been studied.
http://www.springerlink.com/content/uq662g4351676m63/
C could conceivably be "Time". Earthquakes have happened those areas more regularly because of some event (someone previously mentioned the Indonesian quake which shook everything up), which also correlates with higher amounts of fracking purely by coincidence. Note that I don't know enough about the subject to make any sort of conclusion, but there you are.
You forgot possibilities number 4, a flaw in the methodology, and possibility number 5, it is just coincidence.
For example, beginning late August, temperatures drop in North America. That then leads to US national elections in November. So, Autumn causes elections?
The earthquakes here and in Ohio happened near injection wells built to hold waste water from fracking. There was no gas there, else they'd be extracting it, rather than burying their waste there.
When A is correlated with B, there are 3 possibilities. A causes B, B causes A, or both B and A are caused by a third factor C.
Seems like 5 to me.
A causes B
B causes A and B is cyclical (or we're time traveling)
B and A are both caused by C
B is caused by C and A is caused by D, C and D are unrelated
B and A self-contained events with no direct external cause and no relationship to each other
What was it about pumping a high pressure slurry of water and chemicals into the earth's crust that ever made scientific sense?
Fracking is basically a one one-time event, cracking the rock within a few feet of the well using temporary elevated well pressure.
Secondary recovery injects water, steam or carbon dioxide for months or years of time into the ground to push (and sometimes soften) hydrocarbons out to producer wells.
Fracking crackings generate M-4, M-3 size seismic events, unless it activates some pre-existing fault. The seismic events in Chris paper were M1 to M2, or about five Richter magnitude. These are about 30 million times more energetic (one richeter magnetic equals 30x more energy). Earthquake energy is proportional to area of the fault that moves. Destructive earthquakes have fault breaks miles to 100s of miles wide. Microquakes are just feet.
The ability to detect and map M-3 seismic events is hot area of oil industry research. People want to know how successful their fracking was. The tiny seismic event size makes this difficult.
Injection wells can cause larger quakes. the 2nd largest Colorado quake M6 was an waste injection well at the Rocky Flats plutonium production site in the 1960s. Several medium size quakes M4 in western Colorado have been tied to injecting agricultural irrigation water into wells to keep that salt out of rivers.
Which you will note they did instead of treating the water.
What a trustworthy industry.
Someone needs to compare the energy of
these quakes with the energy released by
eating a bowl of Texas Chili with Beans.
Just because there is gurgling and burbling
does not mean that there is distress at depth.
The earth is a living moving thing and quakes
simply reflect that motion. So far no one has
shown these quakes to be a problem. So far.
For those that are history buffs in the late 70s or early
80s there was an annual report from Halliburton with
acres and acres of high pressure pumps fracking
a well. The total horse power of the pumps was
some a million +.
Still a million horsepower is a butterfly sneeze
in the world of earthquakes that mater.
Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities; Truth isn't. Mark Twain.
I'm a computer guys as well. For the data - that's why I specified scientists and supercomputers. I KNOW the task isn't an easy one, that's why it's for the future.
I somehow dropped the 'eventually' I was intending to put before 'deliberately'. Basically the idea is that maybe, in the future, we'll be able to detect high-stress points and deliberately inject water there to trigger lighter earthquakes to prevent bigger ones, using techniques developed for fracking, as opposed to fracking for natural gas and hoping it prevents an earthquake. Even then we'll likely be a long ways of telling what day the earthquake would happen, such that vulnerable structures could be reinforced(perhaps temporarily*), people could put all their stuff on the floor and go camping, etc...
*One idea I first thought of was filling the structure with foam to provide extra support and prevent collapse, though removal would be a technical issue. Then I thought some sort of airbag would be easier - google shows that a Japanese company has already thought of it. :)
I don't read AC A human right
Think about it, the danger of earthquakes is when enormous amounts of pressure are released at once. If something can 'lubricate' the plates in a way that the shifts would be more frequent and less powerful. The end result would be lots of harmless quakes and fewer massive killer quakes. Sounds like a public service rather than a threat of any kind.
(If at first you don't succeed, do it different next time!)
I live pretty much dead center of these TX quakes. 3.2 is the max that's happened here and I didn't feel it at all. Also, most of these are truly localized and shallow, not the kind that lay waste to a wide area atop a fault line. No big deal.
Some companies are developing water-free fracking methods. For instance, GasFrac uses LPG (Liquified Petroleum Gel) instead of water. If water is the problem (or, at least one the problems), it would seem that states might ban the use of water in fracking and require water-free methods. As I understand it, other companies or researches are working on fracking using CO2 or nitrogen.
see: http://www.gasfrac.com/
Or there is perhaps another, yet unknown, force which has been increasing the amount of earthquakes. This force has been acting concurrently, but is unrelated, with fracking.
An example of this would be a relgious person getting cancer. Right as they begin chemo treatment, they start praying to God. The chemo treatment and prayer happen concurrently, but neither is related to one another. While only one is truly causal, it is easy to see how other events which happened concurrently could be interpreted to be the driving force of the results.
The point is, you shouldn't just assume that A causes B without first testing for the existence of a C, D, or E that may have been the cause.
Small earthquakes can't CAUSE large earthqakes. There's a certain amount of potential energy that builds up in a fault line over a given time period that can be released by earthquakes. Every earthquake (caused by fracking and that wouldn't have occured otherwise) leaves less energy available for naturally occuring earthquakes.
It seems that fracking is releasing stress buildup in series of small earthquakes. This is good. We should do more to prevent the big one. West coast should start fracking on a large scale around big cities like San Francsico, the communist capitol of US.
JAM
Their theory states that by lubricating the fault lines with the pumped in waste water, the fault lines are able to slip earlier than they would have without the water.
I've generally assumed that it's not just lubrication that's at issue. The water has to be pumped in at enormous pressure (and just getting it down there adds about another half PSI per foot of depth due to gravity.) This high-pressure water acts over an enormous surface area, pushing the two sides of the fault apart.
Think of the fault as two rough pieces of rock with gradually rising spring pressure trying to make them slide across each other - which only happens when the pressure gets high enough to break the static frictin. Then think of the injected water as turning the fault system into a hydraulic jack the side of several counties, prying the fault open.
Sure it's not enough to pry it open, all by itself. But it's many tons of opposition to the force squeezing the fault together, and thus a corresponding reduction in the static friction. So the quake happens now rather than decades later (when the crosswise force from continental drift would have climbed high enough to cause the quake without help from the "jack".)
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
One thing nobody seems to be realizing is that it may very well be ok to decide that this is a risk that's worthwhile.
Occasional small earthquakes vs. massively cheaper natural gas with a thousand year supply and 30% lower emissions than coal? Sign Earth up, peeze.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
There is a compelling case to be made that Sunrise causes Earthquakes. Every single Earthquake ever recorded by Man has occurred within 24 hours of a Sunrise. Therefore, Sunrise obviously causes Earthquakes.
God I love statistics.
So let me get this straight, people are afraid of a dig site in the middle of no where that MAY have a earthquake in the next two thousand years, which MAY cause a catastrophe that would cause barrels of nuclear waste to seep into the ground water in the middle of no where, which could be easily detected and the closest town which is like 100 miles away could be evacuated...
But people don't care when we're actually causing earthquakes, pumping said 'waste' directly into the ground in various locations around the US that more then likely will not be taken care of properly in the future or watched with such a diligent eye? WTF is wrong with people? This is supposed to be a better option then nuclear?
The spice must flow...
That they will discover that by injecting water into the ground, around the faults, will cause "micro" quakes, and relieve the pressure on the fault lines, which will reduce the chance of a massive earthquake. Now of course, the anti anything crowd will never give credit to the oil industry if this turns out to be useful.
more BS
And that theory would lead to correlation. So when you see correlation, it's indication the causation is correct.
Got it yet, poindexter?
So, Autumn causes elections?
No, elections cause Autumn!!!!!
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
How much solid earth will be left once you've fracked every ounce of gas out of it? I'f like to see where you get the idea that it will provide a thousand years worth of gas, remember to include growth in your calculation.
If you think someone isn't free to have a different definition of "freedom" you may be a tyrant.
this is the common fallacy implied by correlation does not imply causation
if A is correlated to B that does not mean that A causes B or B causes A or C causes A and B, it simply means A and B are correlated
you could find out with statistical data for example that the market prices on Diablo III are correlated with worlwide population numbers
that does not mean there is some causality involved
The Kobolds don't dig it when we inject the toxic waste, so they start rioting.
They feared that it could be used to suppress protest or support unpopular rule.
like the whole Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming position -- questionable conclusions based on questionable equations.
One thing nobody seems to be realizing is that it may very well be ok to decide that this is a risk that's worthwhile.
Occasional small earthquakes vs. massively cheaper natural gas with a thousand year supply and 30% lower emissions than coal? Sign Earth up, peeze.
Are you really naive enough to believe that gas would be 'massively cheaper'? No, they could find a million years worth of gas deposits and it would equate it to only one thing...more profits.
One thing nobody seems to be realizing is that it may very well be ok to decide that this is a risk that's worthwhile.
Maybe.
But what give ME the right to decide that for YOU? [See what I did there? :)]
THINK! It's patriotic
This raises the question: is a man made natural disaster still a "natural" disaster?