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Energy Production Causes Big US Earthquakes
ananyo writes "Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground have caused numerous earthquakes in the United States, scientists have reported in a trio of papers in Science (abstracts here, here and here). Most of these quakes have been small, but some have exceeded magnitude 5.0. They include a magnitude-5.6 event that hit Oklahoma on 6 November 2011, damaging 14 homes and injuring two people."
Time and time again on Slashdot, we've had extraction engineers that work on this say it's completely safe and anyone who says otherwise is fear mongering!
;-)
Clearly these ivory tower scientists are just confused old men because the natural gas companies have absolutely no motive to try to silence this kind of stuff
Sink holes all over Illinois due to aquifer tapping leads me to say: You're surprised?
Earthquakes and global warming around us but who cares, we're getting rich, right?
It's that what matters? /s (-- For the Sarcasm impaired)
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
But isn't the advantage... that by lubricating faults what's happening is that built up tension is being released sooner, rather than later when it's built up even more?
Honestly, this ought to be seen as an advantage. More frequent smaller earthquakes are most likely very prefereable to infrequent but much larger earthquakes.
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the pen is mightier than the sword, the sword is mightier than the court, the court is mightier than the pen.
Exactly! These guys aren't greedy oil company scavengers, they are tectonic chiropractor simply giving the earth's crust an adjustment. It's called natural gas for christ's sake!
The plate stresses are likely caused by the removal of the fluid and gasses that were there before they were pumped out.
emt 377 emt 4
This is a great opportunity for any one with a PhD in seismology wanting to make some money. All you have to do is to say, "these earthquakes did not come from fracking" or "these small earthquakes release the stress energy being built up in these faults. Relieving the strain in numerous small quakes actually ease the faults and make the possibility of large quakes less not more". That is it, a whole sister industry to climate-change-denial industgry will spring up around such people. The miniquake deniers will hang on to the public pronouncement in front of TV cameras by a few people in labcoats as gospel and shrug off peer reviewed research by every one else.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
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You can prevent large earthquakes by making lots of small ones, or by "lubricating" the fault with water.
FICTION: Seismologists have observed that for every magnitude 6 earthquake there are about 10 of magnitude 5, 100 of magnitude 4, 1,000 of magnitude 3, and so forth as the events get smaller and smaller. This sounds like a lot of small earthquakes, but there are never enough small ones to eliminate the occasional large event. It would take 32 magnitude 5's, 1000 magnitude 4's, OR 32,000 magnitude 3's to equal the energy of one magnitude 6 event. So, even though we always record many more small events than large ones, there are far too few to eliminate the need for the occasional large earthquake. As for "lubricating" faults with water or some other substance, if anything, this would have the opposite effect. Injecting high- pressure fluids deep into the ground is known to be able to trigger earthquakes—to cause them to occur sooner than would have been the case without the injection. This would be a dangerous pursuit in any populated area, as one might trigger a damaging earthquake.
While it may be true that such earthquakes are better than the eventual earthquake if such tectonic tension isn't released while it's at lower levels, I suspect that is speculation on various posters' parts - it doesn't take into account that those "sub-plates" weren't moving into a more stable configuration (such as the ancient ones in New York).
That aside, it's a matter of economics and no due diligence on the part of the "energy creators" - such events as these are probably an "economic loss" that is negligible compared to the income such activities cause. And even that (an economic impact) would be dependent on a suit against them being successfully won - and that's something unlikely to happen.
Either way, I doubt they care about any impact or damages unless they are in excess of their profit margins. After all, some of these energy conglomerates/companies had once proposed to drill into the Yellowstone Caldera to create geothermal energy (that one seems like a brilliant plan).
StarTrekPhase2 - The Five Year Mission Continues!
The University of Oklahoma (home of one of the top Petroleum Engineering departments in the country, and recipient of much oil money), geology department has released statements disagreeing. Why aren't you reporting the "controversy" rather than the science? How incredibly biased!
In fact, just a few months ago, one their Geological researchers released a peer reviewed study that showed ... let's see here ... uh... that fracking is causing earthquakes.
Damn. Wait! I know there's a controversy to report here somewhere. Lemme look....ah, here it is:
Oklahoma’s official seismologist — the Geological Survey’s Austin Holland — is skeptical of the link between injection wells an earthquakes, a view shared by the Corporation Commission and the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association, a trade group that lobbies for the interests of oil and gas producers. More data is needed, Holland says.
See, this is actually a controversy! You just have to go to sources that aren't as familiar with the actual data, and/or are in the pockets of the folks doing the fracking. Why isn't this controversy being fairly reported?
Now, scientists have known that geothermal power plants cycling water from underground can cause small quakes. But Brodsky's research actually matches the amount of water moved to the frequency of the quakes.
However, they're still not sure what causes the larger quakes. The hypothesis is that the really big ones might be triggered by other unrelated tremors.
So what van der Elst wanted to know was: "What prompts that slip?" Sometimes it's just all that water building up. However, he discovered that in three cases in the past decade — in Oklahoma, in Colorado and in Texas — the trigger was yet another earthquake, a really big one, thousands of miles away. In each case, the large earthquakes set up large seismic waves that traveled around the surface of the earth "kind of like ripples," van der Elst says. "You can even see them on seismometers, going around the world multiple times."
Source: http://www.npr.org/2013/07/11/200515289/wastewater-wells-geothermal-power-triggering-earthquakes
Sorry, not going to pay for the original nature submissions. The article quotes one year as being "almost 10 fold" increase... .so what was the range of prior observations? Are there observations prior to 1965? Are there any other periods of increased activity?
The second study mentioned says there is some correspondance between wells and quake locations. Again, show us the seismological history at those locations for at least the past 100 years. If these are geologically active zones then why should it be at all surprising that some earthquakes occur near drilling work?
This seems like an obvious statistical problem: has the frequency of small earthquakes changed ?
There is a baseline level at which small earthquakes occur. During the age of fracking, is the frequency more (or less).
It would probably be an easy exercise to get data from 40 or 50 years ago (before any fracking existed) and compare the distribution of earthquake data.
The biggest problem might be the lack of sufficient sample size for the current era.
From "Energy Production Causes Big US Earthquakes" to "Most of these quakes have been small, but some have exceeded magnitude 5.0."
From the USGS website, there are an estimated 1,444,469 earthquakes per year (based on records since 1990). There are 1,319 earthquakes per year which measure form 5.0 to 5.9 on the Richter scale. The article cites one instance of an earthquake which the scientists guess is because of fracking. Nature, you are not exactly knocking my socks off here.
sudo make me a sandwich
More people die on I-35 in Oklahoma in a single year. How much is the economic value of I-35 worth to you? How many deaths per dollar?
Out of modpoints but really liked a post? 1BDkF6TtmmeZ3yqXbz9yhdYVqRYnwFoXDj
Good point! If they'd stop drilling for oil, fewer Oklahomans would be able to afford cars or gas, reducing casualties on I-35. Let's prevent death and injury by banning the fracking.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
How much is the economic value of I-35 worth to you?
It leads to Texas, so none. ;)
"Quote me as saying I was mis-quoted." -Groucho Marx
Ok 2 injured, but were they children? If they were then just thing of the children, if not they are of no interest to the politics of the situation.
Natural-gas extraction, geothermal-energy production and other activities that inject fluid underground
no those first two are really the only two. finding a study which suddenly lumps a very controversial method of extracting natural gas next to a method of energy production we've used for 40 years is actually rather suspicious.
Good people go to bed earlier.
How much is the economic value of I-35 worth to you?
It leads to Texas, so none. ;)
And how many deaths per dollar? A recent trial set that to be $150 plus disappointment. We're talking Texas here, of course.
frak the fracking?!
the natural gas companies have absolutely no motive to try to silence this kind of stuff
Sure they have motive.
Now what about the motive of all of the oil rich regions we do not buy from because we have a larger supply of natural gas? How is it THEY have no motive?
It is a bald-faced lie to claim there is more profit in extracting natural gas locally than there is in paying to drill oil from another country and ship it here.
So who do YOU work for, eh?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I'm not entirely sure you understand how fracking works. One typically injects things of higher pressure (to counteract the pressure from the source material) and controls the upwards flow. It's likely the higher pressure plus additional fluid causing the slippage, whether by one area weakening and essentially exploding, or by giving it enough lubrication and pressure to increase slipping potential, would be the most-often cause of fracking earthquakes.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
I don't think you appreciate how easy it is to set off kilotons, megatons, even gigatons of TNT with just a tiny bit of energy.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
That snippet doesn't actually seem to say what it claims it does. The claim is that many small earthquakes can prevent larger ones, which it labels as fiction. But when you read into the rationale, it seems to say exactly the opposite: large quake can be prevented by many small ones, but it takes an impractical number of them: 1000 mag-3s to offset a mag-6.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
I'm not intimately knowledgable about fracking, but I am thinking more of the crude oil removed from the site. I doubt they replace fluid or gas at one to one levels, and I expect they don't leave the site at the same pressures they found it at...
emt 377 emt 4
The attention is selective here, just like the weekly M = 7 quakes that occur every week or so around the world that nobody mentions because they happen in unpopulated places. Most quakes happen on plate margins, and although I am not denying any of the findings of the article, the fact is nothing new. Human activities do cause events that are recorded in the Richter range of M = 1 to M = 5, but the number and range of events caused by geologic processes is much more significant.
Still, it is true that pumping fluids into and out of porous rocks can cause events on significantly correlated time scales. Explosions of all types including those for mining can also cause events, Seimographs are a significant tool for monitoring nuclear tests, especially of they are illegal and secret. North Korea's tests were detected very quickly by USGS as would any Iran might conduct.
You're mostly right, and it's because you need higher pressures to control the flow of that which is already under pressure pumping through your pipes.
Either way, a cavern without a semi-solid fluid in place for support suddenly collapses. This is how fracking works, after you drain the reservoir, the only pressure left is what you're putting into the system. Then you stop adding pressure and start to bleed it off to try to keep the surface intact. Natural forces take over. This is almost the exact same problem Memphis has with their water pumps, with the entire city sitting atop an underground reservoir coming off of the Mississippi river. That's why we're having earthquakes again (well, I'm not there but I get friends reporting them with their own home seismographs planted across their properties.)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
If you actually understand the technologies involved, you'd know that they're talking about fracking, not the extraction of natural gas by conventional processes. But don't let that disturb your hysterical screaming, Slashdotters, it's just reality. I know that few of you have any real connection to reality.
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