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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!
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?
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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.
...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)
And here come the psuedo-skeptics to attack anyone who even dares suggest what is in the interests of commercial entities may not entirely be in the interests of the wider society. I mean, God would never allow a universe to exist where humans could fuck themselves over. God wants unconstrained industries doing whatever the fuck they want, and we should just go and fucking kill anyone who ever even hints that maybe unconstrained resource extraction might possibly kind of potentially cause problems. Environmentalists are the only evil, and God loves money, CEOs, Koch brothers and AC's who post on Internet sites to condemn any concerns.
Oh, and Al Gore rapes bunnies!!!!!
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
What are you talking about? What post are you responding to you because I don't really see any earth is failing kinda posts. Are you trying to say that they are completely harmless. Because that's a bunch of BS
Sorry, teleporters just kill you and then make a copy. A perfect, soul-less copy.
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 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.
Whoops, it certainly wasn't consciously intentional :)
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They're not shell corporations; they're legitimately owned and operated by other parties, who gladly take the profit.
For every idiotic and hyperbolic action, there is an equal and opposite idiotic and hyperbolic reaction.
So look at the crap you constantly spew here and tell me you are surprised you get the opposite crap right back in your face.
Oh, I see...YOU are always right,
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.
Actually there has been damages. read up on it. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...
This is due to water injection wells as a result of fracking and other oil/gas drilling.
-G
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
the only place in the world where you can get an earthquake and a tornado on the same day now.
Sounds like we have a follow up to Sharknado! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27...
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
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.
Oh, and Al Gore rapes bunnies!!!!!
Not anymore.
He has moved onto cherubim.
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
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?
Oh, and Al Gore rapes bunnies!!!!!
I come here for news, not for a reference to a youtube video that everyone has seen.
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?
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.
Maybe the time has finally come for large-scale transportation fuel production from biomass pyrolysis.
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.