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Oklahoma's Earthquakes Linked To Fracking
An anonymous reader writes Oklahoma has already experienced about 240 minor earthquakes this year, roughly double the rate at which California has had them. A recent study (abstract) has now tied those earthquakes to fracking. From the article: "Fracking itself doesn't seem to be causing many earthquakes at all. However, after the well is fracked, all that wastewater needs to be pumped back out and disposed of somewhere. Since it's often laced with chemicals and difficult to treat, companies will often pump the wastewater back underground into separate disposal wells. Wastewater injection comes with a catch, however: The process both pushes the crust in the region downward and increases pressure in cracks along the faults. That makes the faults more prone to slippages and earthquakes. ... More specifically, the researchers concluded that 89 wells were likely responsible for most of the seismic activity. And just four wells located southeast of Oklahoma City were likely responsible for about one-fifth of seismic activity in the state between 2008 and 2013."
Apparently, estimates of the distance that the wastewater travels from the SWD were off by nearly an order of magnitude.
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The weakest part of the whole fracking operation is really sloppy treatment of the wastewater. There have been large spills in some places, and the disposal is often questionable (as seen here). The fracking process itself gets the most scientific scrutiny, because it's what's technically new about fracking, but good ol' wastewater handling is a mess, just as it was in the mining days.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Companies have been pumping water (usually wastewater or seawater) down wells since the start of the latter half of the 20th century, to restore pressure in oil reservoirs. So how is this anything new and anything connected with fracking?
Also, I don't unerstand why people make such a big deal out of these minor earthquakes which are general to small too feel even if you're paying attention for them. The amount of energy they're dealing with is only in the ballpark of these tiny quakes; compared to a large earthquake, it'd be like a mouse trying to push a boulder off a cliff. Either the boulder is ready to go or it's not, the mouse makes essentially no difference.
I was watching this thing on TV about some guy named Hitler. Someone should stop him!
It's really interesting to see the lengths that fracking companies put between themselves and wastewater, basically outsourcing the wastewater manage process to entirely separate companies explicitly for the purpose of no longer being responsible for the wastewater. They've done this pretty much from the start, too.
At the beginning it was most likely to give themselves a buffer when the environmental problems or health problems arose due to all those unclassified chemicals of dubious safety used in fracking that remain in the wastewater. Now it may provide them another buffer when it comes time to blame a party for the cause of these earthquakes.
Much like the GMO argument, it is the strange and suspicious actions of the companies that raises concerns rather than what they are doing. I'm sure more ethical businesses could frack and dispose of wastewater safely; none do. Just as I'm sure Monsanto could make GMO products without such bizarre legal actions that leverage their product to punish farmers.
People wouldn't bat an eye if the fracking or GMO industry had transparency, honesty, and responsibility rather than endless misdirection and threats.
Regulation will happen when most of the resources that fracking allows us access too have been used up.
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You know what 'fracking' refers to, right? Hydraulic fracturing?
The rocks are being purposely stressed by high pressure liquids and crack under the pressure, releasing oil/gas that was previously trapped and irretrievable.
So what this has to do with fracking is that they thought that just pumping fluid back in would hold things up, but clearly that's not true. The integrity of the final rock/fluid combination is inferior to the original. Old wells were like sticking a straw in a drink and sucking it up. It's not really the same (though old oil wells have been known to sink and collapse as well, so it's not like that was risk free either).
Is it a real problem? Well, I don't live there, so I don't know. I don't think it's wise to tinker with geology that we clearly don't understand well yet, however.
"fracking" refers to the whole process. and that process as it is right now seems to cause earthquakes. if that is because the company owner have godlike powers or because they pump water back in causing issues is irrelvant.
Fracking releases the energy in the faults, thus fracking triggers quakes. But the energy doesn't come from fracking...
...And the quake would have happened anyway...
That's like someone pushing you off a cliff and then blaming gravity for your death.
OK, Nostradamus, we believe you...
Reproducibility is a key element in scientific research. I've think you've demonstrated a pretty strong case for it right there.
Also: Occam's Razor. You didn't have earthquakes before and they started when the practice of crumbling the foundational geology beneath you. And this is happening in many places where they never previously experienced earthquakes. As if we even need a scientific study commissioned to determine this? The repeated, consistent anecdotal evidence is overwhelming proof enough on its own.
Standard denialist garbage. What amount of fact is enough to convince you? Think about that for a moment. What data would you have to see, to be convinced that fracking is causing earthquakes?
As to proof, how do you know anything is real? We might be living on a roughly spherical shaped object lit by a much larger nearby roughly spherical object, or we might not. We could be living in a giant simulator that is so good, supernaturally good, that we can't tell it apart from reality. God could have created the universe in 7 days. How can we tell? We can't! We understand that we can make good conclusions from observable reality, no matter whether it is real or not. To the best of our knowledge, what we observe is real, but we understand there could be a deeper reality. Whether there is or not does not affect our work.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
Hi, exploration geophysicist here.
Existing faults exist with various levels of stress. Some of them are sitting on a hair trigger to release massive amounts of energy. Maybe it naturally would have been another 50000 years before it would go off. And the hair trigger can be indirectly disturbed by a smaller nearby quake.
Smaller quakes can relieve pressure in one place but this then puts more pressure in another place further down the line, the ground is all connected. That's what happened in Haiti, the fault there is like a zipper with a bulge in it, with the stress point moving along the fault westward in a long series of quakes.