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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.
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A lot depends on how much the resource extraction did to actually cause the quake at that moment.
Most geological features are extremely massive and not so precariously balanced, but there are exceptions to that like faults.
If the quake was going to happen eventually anyway, and all we did was hasten it a few years or a few decades, the reality is that the extraction determined the time of the incident, but did not cause the actual build up of energy. All you did was move up the quake schedule.
In that way, you may have caused it to go off with less energy and that could be helpful. An example would be much like those folks who use surplus artillery pieces to cause controlled avalanches so that an inevitable avalanche is allowed to come down predictably and with a little bit of control.
Do I think resource extraction is working that way? Certainly not, because we're not planning extraction in that way. What we're doing now is shooting artillery at the snow pack for other reasons and not really caring where it comes down or when. If they even believe that it will come down at all to begin with.
Still, I would be careful about assigning blame to extraction companies for big killer earthquakes. The fact is that your big earthquakes are dealing in colossal forces. If they were balanced so finely that extraction could set them off, you can be pretty sure that that earthquake was coming anyway. It's sort of like drilling a well and accidentally releasing buried Cthulhu. Sure, you released a Great Old One, but let's face it, if he was that close to the surface, *somebody* was going to do it eventually. You can't just stop drilling wells just because you might possibly release unfathomable forces from outside of Time and Space. Such forces tend to take care of themselves.