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Seismological Society of America Claims Fracking Reactivated Ohio Fault
eldavojohn writes There have been suspicions that fracking has caused minor earthquakes in Ohio but last year seismic data recorded by the Earthscope Transportable Array was analyzed by the Seismological Society of America using template matching and has resulted in a new publication and press release making the statement that Hilcorp Energy's fracking in Poland Township in March of 2014 "did not create a new fault, rather it activated one that we didn't know about prior to the seismic activity." The earthquakes occurred in the Precambrian basement and lead the researchers to posit that further unknown faults may be activated by fracking. The press release ends with urging for "close cooperation among government, industry and the scientific community as hydraulic fracturing operations expand in areas where there's the potential for unknown pre-existing faults."
Despite there being no published science about its safety, and despite evidence that it is actually polluting wells and ground water ... it will keep happening.
Because government officials are all paid heavily by the oil and gas industry to make damned sure they can do anything they want to, right up to tearing up private property because they want to.
These short sighted clowns only care about profits, and don't give a damn about anything else.
I can't imagine government is going to start reigning in corporations any time soon ... which means all laws and policy will continue to be so skewed in favor of corporations as to be laughable.
America is nothing but an oligarchy these days.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
what if causing a number of small earthquakes prolongs the release of a large one. Less energy is being pent up so the slippage should do less damage
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
We seem to have done a piss poor job of explaining the benefits of clean air and clean water to our fellow citizens.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
At worst, it can release stress that is already there. So they can "cause" an earthquake. But it's the big motions of the ground that we have no influence over that really puts stress in the ground.
Isn't it true that stress that builds up over time would get released anyway, SOMETIME? (Unless the forces that caused the stress in the first place reversed so as to release it....)
I mean, the release of chemicals, water pollution and consumption, and greenhouse gas emissions are all reasonable charges to make against fracking, but as far as earthquakes, weren't they inevitable anyway?
Also, wouldn't triggering an earthquake cause a quake of less magnitude than would occur if allowed to build up and release naturally?
--PeterM
I told the Precambrian family not to install a basement. But did they listen? Noooooo.
Well then... this is obviously their fault.
Don't the mini quakes release energy from the faults more safely?
mini quakes along active fault lines release pent-up energy that protects against "the big one" -- but a dormant fault is like a healed over fracture in your bone -- if nothing disturbs it, it will continue to heal over. Now that it is active again, this will cause a chain reaction of stresses that will likely have continental and possibly global consequences, as it changes the way the other faults interact with each other.
Basically, it made all the related fracture lines that much less predictable.
Given that the price of oil is now around threepence ha'penny a barrel, isn't this all rather academic? Surely fracking is no longer economically viable?
Andrew Oakley - www.aoakley.com
Funny how convenient the timing is. This from a society where ExxonMobil Upstream Research Company ( http://www.seismosoc.org/insid... ) is a corporate member. Not that I endorse fracking, but my internal conspiracy theorist is making loud noises in my head.
Break up solid rocks deep in the ground, suck out the oil, and then fill the hole with a water slurry. What could go wrong?
I was under the impression there is a relationship between supply and demand; now you say maintaining supply in the face of falling demand has no effect on price?
Or are you simply playing with words? "Set the price" being a function of "set the supply," I think even that argument fails.
because as soon as fracking triggers the yellowstone caldera we are all done.
There's a relationship, but like all commodities it's more complicated than that. But the futures markets and all sorts of stuff completely unrelated to supply and demand also are huge factors.
It is long past the point where these things happen in isolation.
I seriously doubt even this comes close to explaining it:
I'm not playing with words at all. I'm saying that modern economics is FAR more complex than "when demand goes up price goes up". Modern economics is full of vagaries, speculation, collusion, and other bullshit.
Despite claims to the contrary, economists don't know much more about how the economy works than you or I ... because economics is at least 50% ideology.
You look for, and see, the outcomes you believe in.
What economics is not, is an objective natural law. It's a series of observations which may or may not extend as far as people who use it claims, and whose premises may or may not be reliable.
Economics is NOT a real science. There's a lot more voodoo in it that people admit.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Physics is almost 14 billion years old, but parts of it are still unknown. Just because we've been doing something for 100 years doesn't mean we understand it completely.
It doesn't hurt to be nice.
The Iraq war was basically a subsidy for the oil and gas industry. No, you don't get to phrase the argument so that only your position can win by claiming it has to be a direct subsidy, while indirect don't count.
No, it wasn't.
The Iraq war was basically to prevent Iraq setting up a Euro-baed petroleum exchange, thereby undermining the commodity-baed dollar and turning it back into a fiat currency, which would have been disastrous to the U.S., since the price of the dollar is pinned to the price of oil by the fact that almost all oil sales of any note are done in dollars.
It was also a bailout for Europe, which gets most of their oil from the Middle East. What oil the U.S. gets from the Middle East does not end up shipped to the U.S., it's used by the U.S. military overseas, which, given active operations, consumes bout 24% of the total of all U.S. petroleum consumption. The U.S. gets almost all its oil from local or hemisphere local sources.
The variability in U.S. pump prices has everything to do with the futures market, and self-restraint on refining by the petroleum companies in order to control the supply of refined oil, and almost nothing to do with the availability of top sweet crude.
It's about economics, not resources.
It sounds like these seismologists are relying almost entirely on template matching, which is nothing more than a pattern recognition algorithm. These kinds of algorithms are no substitute for intelligent analysis, especially in the absence of reliable statistics. They can be used and abused like any other engineering tool if they aren't properly understood.
Maybe the Seismological society didn't know about it, but I find it hard to believe that the drilling company didn't. Wife works as exec assistant to head geologist at an oil/gas company. They spend hours pouring over seismic data, logs, 3d maps etc of the underground structure before anything else ever happens. And this is at a small company (100-200 emp). I'd love to see the data the company in Ohio has and if this unknown fault is clearly seen in it.
Citing "Australia right now" in support of "Global Warming" (also known as "Climate Change") is ridiculous
Maybe, unless you have insight into the trends and Australia Now is consistent with those trends. Extremes that would have happened about 2% of the time in the 30 years prior to the 80's were happening about 6% of the time in the 30 years prior to 2010. In the last 15 years they have occurred about 10% of the time: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of... . This trend of increasing extremes is what we would expect in a warming country: http://www.bom.gov.au/state-of...
The picture becomes even more cohesive if you look at the temperature trend in the context of radiative physics and what we know about the atmospheric CO2 trend.
I dont consider allowing people to keep their own money, giving them money. only in "we need more money!!!" politics does that count
I don't consider allowing people to shit on our environment permissible. It's not their money, it's our money. They are legal fictions and without government protection someone would come along and stop them from doing what they are doing, by force if necessary. This is one of the things Carlin really had nailed down. The rich have all of the money and pay none of the taxes, at least per centum. The middle class has almost none of the money, and pays all of the taxes. The poor are just kept around to scare the middle class. That's why income taxes are slavery when corporations write the laws, which is the situation we have here today. But corporate taxes, they are completely necessary. Who should pay for the system? The greatest beneficiaries. And the corporations (and those who profit from them) are that. They're the slave-takers and slave-keepers, both.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"