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USGS: Oil and Gas Operations Could Trigger Large Earthquakes
sciencehabit writes: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has taken its first stab at quantifying the hazard from earthquakes associated with oil and gas development. The assessment, released in a preliminary report today, identifies 17 areas in eight states with elevated seismic hazard. And geologists now say that such induced earthquakes could potentially be large, up to magnitude 7, which is big enough to cause buildings to collapse and widespread damage.
Update: 04/23 15:56 GMT by T :
New submitter truavatar adds: At the same time, the Oklahoma Geological Survey released a statement explicitly calling out deep wastewater injection wells to Oklahoma earthquakes, stating "The OGS considers it very likely that the majority of recent earthquakes, particularly those in central and north-central Oklahoma, are triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells."
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
and... OPEC!
If you pop it, that's the end
As a favorite author liked to say, "there ain't no such thing as a free lunch." Unfortunately we are very poor at evaluating externalized costs. The pollution put out by coal plants that are "far enough" away from cities, the fish that are killed by hydroelectric damns, the excess carbon produced by all fossil fuels, and now the potential for damaging earthquakes from large scale oil and gas operations.
Of course the first ones to ignore externalized costs are the business offloading those costs on everyone else. And if a magnitude 7 quake gets triggered and people get hurt or killed (potentially dozens or hundreds of people in the US and possibly many more in less developed areas) the corporations responsible ought to be liable for millions or billions of dollars. But if necessary they'll lawyer up for a fraction of the cost and drag the issue out in court for years until everyone forgets. After all, how do you prove that this particular quake wouldn't have happened without drilling? And how do you prove which company's actions triggered the quake?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Nothing to see here. Just some more of that science gobble-dee-gook.
A little late for April Fools, I think. But this was the plot of a movie - "Megafault"
One of the most hilarious desaster movies I've ever seen, which included such elements as an earthquake ... "driving"? down the freeway at 70 mph chasing our hero's!
I would have thought people would be happy to have a bunch of small mostly inconsequential earthquakes instead of one large damaging one every few years.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Unfortunately this announcement comes from the executive branch of the US government. Many of us have developed zero trust in anything coming from DC.
Please, AGM, or, Anthropogenic Geological Movement is a lie. There is no way that humans can possibly affect the planet on such a scale. Clearly, this is an attempt by the weak, Marxist, totalitarian, strong-arm dictator to do whatever it takes to destroy Amerika's freedom.
Any of you even read the the small article? Good grief, I see the "OMG, the earth is falling crap" still works with the majority of the slashdot readers who all seem to be genius levels at every topic.
...is that the oil and gas companies were enthusiastic participants in the study, providing the data. Their rationale was one of enlightened self-interest, I'm sure: THEY don't want to get sued if they cause an earthquake, and the USGS analysis will tell them where/how it's safe to drill.
(My source is an interview on either NPR or BBC World News, which I can't find a link to at the moment)
Reactions will actually be a great way (though with one flaw/complication with Democrats) to tell the difference between politicians and "politicians."
A conservative will look at the science, shrug, and say "That's the cost of oil, but we want it really badly so it's worth it."
A Republican will deny the science. "The scientists are lying," and the really fun ones might expand with something like "The bible says earthquakes are cased by God, not drilling. These stupid scientists are looking at evidence and everyone knows that believing evidence is how Satan tricks us."
A liberal will look at the science, get mad, and say "We have to stop this drilling!"
A Democrat will look at it, and .. actually on this issue I'm not sure what a Democrat will do. In many cases they'll take some obfuscatory position (they want to keep getting paid, but not get caught saying quite anything mind-numbingly stupid in public as a Republican would), but in the case of drilling they actually might take the side of liberals. Or possibly even conservatives. These people can be complicated.
(And a libertarian will combine the conservative and the liberal: "We have to stop drilling or else secure bonds from the drillers, to pay for the earthquakes they cause. Once we start charging for the earthquakes, the market can decide whether or not the oil is worth it." And some so-called conservatives might take the libertarian position.)
So anyway, I guess while this issue is good for conservatives, it's less useful for liberals. Conservatives can use this to out Republicans but liberals won't be able to necessarily detect Democrats in their midst. Fucking Democrats. They can be very stealthy.
Half of U.S. Fracking Companies Will Be Dead or Sold This Year
Demand for fracking, a production method that along with horizontal drilling spurred a boom in U.S. oil and natural gas output, has declined as customers leave wells uncompleted because of low prices.
Of course, when Russia decides that their economy has taken enough damage that forces them to pull out of the Ukraine, and the Big Oil players have completed buying out the going-out-of-business small/middle sized oil and drilling companies and their mineral leases, then the West will signal the Saudis that its ok to cut back production and let oil/gas prices rise again.
Back when I was a kid, if you wanted to create a man-made earthquake, you needed some madman like Lex Luther to hijack a nuclear weapon and set it off underground. Who knew all you needed was some simple wastewater injection?
I live in central Oklahoma and we're getting several 3.0+ magnitude quakes a week now. Sometimes several a day. Oklahoma is more seismically active than almost anywhere else on the planet right now. The oil and gas industry claims that they've been doing wastewater injection for years without any problems (which is true), but what they're not saying is that they're doing about 20% more of it than they used to. It is probably that, plus the location of the faults, which is causing all the quakes.
Oklahoma is probably the only place in the world where you can get an earthquake and a tornado on the same day now.
Was that intentional?
to $4+/gal gas.
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater.
The first case of earthquakes caused by fluid injection came in the nineteen-sixties. Engineers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical-weapons manufacturing center near Commerce City, Colorado, disposed of waste fluids by injecting them down a twelve-thousand-foot well. More than a thousand earthquakes resulted, several of magnitudes close to 5.0. “Unintentionally, it was a great experiment,” Justin Rubinstein, who researches induced seismicity for the U.S.G.S., told me.
The article is full of conjecture with lots of "could" . Just because it is from a scientific organization it does not mean it is a scientific study. To make it more scientific how about looking at gas exploration and cracking from all over the world to see if it is causing more earthquakes? How about some data points instead of "could"?
The oil and gas industry are merely trying to relieve "earth tension". The planet Earth is tense... and needs a good massage. We'll thank them later.
and your cheap gas, suv lifestyles!
They're not shell corporations; they're legitimately owned and operated by other parties, who gladly take the profit.
Just waiting for the shills like "circletimessquare" to come out of retirement and start posting pro-fracking drivel.
Let's try injecting water into some California fault, safely out in the desert, to see if a major fault can be moved using this technique. I know that the state doesn't have any water to spare at the moment, but we can use treated wastewater or other "junk" water for the experiment.
More hyperbole from the leftists. Large earthquakes cannot occur at the shallow depth of drilling. Minor ones, maybe. There is been $0 in earthquake damages since the start of the fracking revolution 10 years ago. You can't get around that.
Five years ago we had the BP spill the in The Gulf.
Now they're creating earthquakes.
The chickens have come home to roost.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
given the power of oil companies in Oklahoma. Here is one interesting article:
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
that discusses how they keep control over drilling.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
You don't think the oil and gas industry hasn't spent millions of dollars to try to say that fracking is perfectly safe and couldn't possibly cause any harm?
Of course they have. You'd have to be living under a rock with your fingers in your ears to think otherwise.
Basically they've done what the tobacco industry did .. delay, obfuscate, and claim that it's up to someone else to prove it's dangerous while they assume it's safe without evidence.
More or less, yes this is exactly what they are doing. The playbook is almost identical. Claim that there is insufficient proof, ask for more studies (funded by them frequently), hire "experts" to promote their viewpoint, hire politicians to hinder any regulations, etc. Take the tobacco PR playbook, scratch out tobacco and write in fossil fuels and that is almost exactly what they are doing.
You don't think a massive lobbying, PR, and fake science campaign isn't an actual conspiracy?
I think it is a rather clear and unsurprising expression of economic self interest which in many cases is contrary to the public interest. I don't think you need to invoke some grand conspiracy theory to understand their actions though I would not be shocked to find out that there was some fossil fuel companies acting illegally in cahoots. Anything that makes it more expensive to drill/refine/sell, increases regulation or reduces fossil fuel use is likely to be opposed by producers of fossil fuels. They all know they basically think the same way on the topic so they're all behaving more or less as expected.
Drill baby, drill!
Injection we'll induced quakes caused by
-rocky flats manufacturing waste disposal1960s
-farm irrigation waste disposal Rifle 2000s
-coal mine waste water Trinidad 1990s
They had to since the USGS, and other outside geological researchers have all come to the same conclusions based on the evidence culled from a number of separate studies and the OGS had no research to counter with.
It is not near any current modern plate boundaries.
But there an ancient boundary where the huge 1812 quakes occurred in Missouri.
Plate boundaries are a tautology (circular definition): they are defined by linear zones of seismic it's; in turn they define the most likely future quake locations.
if it's really from wastewater disposal. It should be pretty easy to find an alternate way to dispose of wastewater. Filter it and reuse it or pump it into a big pond and let it evaporate.
That could cost oil companies and farmers more money. It is likely the waste will have to purified like sewage into clean water and toxic solid waste.
Unfortunately this announcement comes from the executive branch of the US government.
So what? Either the facts support the claims or they do not. Who it is from is irrelevant to its veracity. There is a reason we insist that scientific findings be repeatable so that others may confirm the findings. The fact that a government agency is involved is irrelevant to the scientific process.
Many of us have developed zero trust in anything coming from DC.
So even if what they are saying is actually true, you plan to dismiss it out of hand because you dislike government in general. This in spite of the fact that you provided no actual reason to dispute the conclusions reached in the study nor any articulated reason to think the USGS is being dishonest in any way.
Fracking has been going on for nearly 50 years.
But only fairly recently has it been employed in large scale in the relevant area. It wasn't economically feasible in lots of cases due to the availability of much easier and cheaper sources of oil and gas.
But now...NOW, it's causing earthquakes.
Apparently so. Do you have evidence of an alternative reason for earthquakes to go from 2/year prior to 2008 up to over 2/DAY in 2013?
I see.
So you are skeptical? That's fine. Have you looked at all the evidence and found a plausible alternative hypothesis we can test?
A thought (although surely not unique): Pit the industry that is doing this, against our beloved lawmakers. Suggest that terrorists could use this methodology to cause damaging earthquakes that could potentially kill people. Any politician that rolls their eyes at this suggestion is surely to have the ridicule and damnation of their peers visited upon them, because they're not anti-terrorist and pro-america... right?
Assume its a fact: this causes earthquakes. The only question that remains is: do the residents in the area have sufficient political strength and willpower to overpower the corporations and make them stop?
If not, then they should just move somewhere else.
All "shoulds" aside, that is how the real world works.
PR wage-slave #326, cube 34F, shift 2, paid for with generous funding provided by a really unclear trail of ownership. Who can say, really?
I forget what 8 was for.
Scientist after a ten year 10 billion usd scientific study have determined that the majority of children born to mothers will in fact die. Lawyers and government bureaucrats are scrambling to cash in on this windfall from mothers who knowingly bring children into the world knowing they are flawed and in all likely will see a horrible death in an old age home utterly forgotten. Actuaries estimate that the lawsuits could easily amount to trillions of dollars.
the Point is that everything has risk. If you suck the tits of mother earth long enough, you might give her an orgasm (aka an earth quack). Just because she might have an earthquack every once in while doesn't mean you should stop sucking that good juicy oil. Humanity needs it to run our cars. Without cars we can't send people to their government run health care facilities in ambulaces. Everyone is going to die. Whether they die in an earth quack(earth orgasm) or they die walking to the hospital because there is not oil is immaterial. We should not hold up progress for a buch of faggoty ass liberals. Fuck mother earth.
Everyone reading this is alive only because their forefathers were not as enlightened as you ohh soo liberal asshates. Your forefathers tamed mother earth to tap her resouces to create a world that can support 7 billion of you fuckers. Your forefathers also outcompeted / outmanipulated / outkilled other competing animals and human beings who were perfectly nice in their own right, but didn't get to reproduce because you parents were better at killing.
Maybe the time has finally come for large-scale transportation fuel production from biomass pyrolysis.
Just means it's time for the ones responsible to switch gears and focus on other ways of discrediting evidence.
I blame you guys. You are the ones buying the oil causing the earth orgasms. If you are using electricity provided by fossil fuel to power your laptop, you are contributing to earth orgasms in oaklahoma. Yep it is your fault. I am on the other hand not guilty. I am out and proud. I am an unenlighted old white male who enjoys raping the planet repeatedly and plunging my probiscus deep into the heart of mother earth to suck up her juicy black goodness. I am proud of the fact humanity has figured out a way to create earth quakes. Fuck yea.
If two males can marry each other, I wonder if I could marry the planet earth next earth day. After all you can't go to jail for raping your own wife. Right?
If you would extend your informations to those small and unimportant areas of the world that do not belong to the USA, you would find the example of Gronngen, in Holland. From the sixties a very large gasdeposit was exploited http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groningen_gas_field. In the seventies and eighties small earthquakes occurred in that province, which was peculiar, because there are almost no earthquakes in Holland. But both frequency and strength kept increasing. http://www.nlog.nl/nl/reserves/reserves/reassessment-of-the-probability-of-higher-magnitude-earthquakes-in-the-groningen-gas-field.pdf
To cut a long story of greed and denial short: gas exploitation is now cut back and some damages will be paid.
But what really bugs me is that nobody seems to be aware of this plain and important example of correlation between eqrthquakes and gas/oil exploitation.
USA-only?
Paai
It says the problem is caused by water disposal wells. These wells are primarily utilized by the oil industry, but guess what, they are not the only industry that uses disposal wells to get rid of wastewater. Recently a controversy erupted in southern California because a local wastewater district (sewage) that wants to use a disposal well to get rid of its water because it cannot comply with the salinity requirements of the EPA for discharge into surface waters. Guess who else uses disposal wells, companies that make electronic components and companies that make solar cells. The aircraft industry used to be one of the largest users of disposal wells to get rid of solvents- but after a few Superfund cleanup sites were related to this practice it ended- mostly because they were injecting into usable aquifers, which the oil industry does not do. Conventional oil production (with or without fracking) often generates ten times more water production than oil. Most of the time that water is salty so it cannot be discharged on the surface. After all, that water was once ocean water, that got trapped in the rocks as they were deposited. In some places, like California, the oil companies actually produce fresh water that is sold to local water districts for irrigation purposes. This problem of disposing of produced water that is saline has existed as long as the oil industry has existed, and disposal wells have been used routinely for probably 100 years now. The earthquake problems are not a surprise, but are the result of a lack of regulatory supervision over what are often very small companies that do nothing but dispose of wastewater. Obviously their incentive is to pump as much water down the hole as fast as they can, and that is the problem that needs to be solved. If regulators would force them to constrain their injection to a maximum rate, determined by analysis of the injection profile and reservoir rock, this problem could easily be eliminated. In the oil industry's case, they are just returning water to deep formations after removing it to capture the oil. It is usually not the same formation but the formations that are used are known to have capacity to accept more salty water than they already contain.