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."

Comments

Maybe so but...

[click2005]

Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.

Re:Maybe so but...

[hawguy]

Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.

They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.

Re:Maybe so but...

[pushing-robot]

Then again, if these are already areas of 'elevated seismic hazard', it's quite possible that inducing the plates to slip now will prevent an even larger quake in the future.

Geoengineering is a new science with great unknowns; we should not approach it without caution, nor should we assume anything we do is bad.

Re:Maybe so but...

[Holi]

Yes because Oklahoma is such a hot bed for earthquakes.

"There were more earthquakes of magnitude 3 or higher in Oklahoma last year than in California. Several were of a magnitude greater than 5 and caused considerable damage."

We are talking about areas that until recently have been considered geologically stable. Don't you think that the USGS have taken that into account?

Re:Maybe so but...

[Ol Olsoc]

Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.

They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling

But not bp or exxon corporations?

TANSTAAFL

[Daetrin]

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?

Re:TANSTAAFL

[MightyMartian]

I don't think we're poor at evaluating externalized costs. I think we're just very damned good at completely ignoring them, attacking anyone who tries to remind us of them, and undermining any kind of political or social solutions that might be brought forward. We are easily lead by the nose by those willing to tell us what to hear. We're cowards.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[DigiShaman]

So I've read that what's happening is the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back". Meaning all this activity only hastened the inevitable; an earthquake. Some geologists have stated that in hindsight, this may actually be a good thing in that it releases stress that would otherwise buildup and cause an even bigger quake at a much later date. Much MUCH later I would think. So I dunno, if a mag 7 goes off, could you really prove who or what caused it though??

Re:TANSTAAFL

[tnk1]

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.

Re:TANSTAAFL

[Daetrin]

I'm sure a class action suit would work great.

Earthquake hits LA, does major damage. Oil and gas companies are taken to court in a class action lawsuit. (There's a lot of oil production here, especially around Long Beach.)

The case drags on for years, but eventually the companies have to settle, let's say for $10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money right? Except half of it goes to the lawyers. Then half of the rest is made as a tax deductible donation to the Red Cross for disaster relief. The remaining 2.5 billion is split amongst the approximately 18.5 million residents of greater Los Angeles. Which would come out to a little under $150 per person. And it's delivered in the form of coupons for 50% off your next 100 gallons of gas. That 2.5 billion will of course go into a fund until those coupons are redeemed, and i would be surprised if the companies responsible don't get to keep the interest on those funds until they're spent to reimburse the gas stations that redeem the coupons. And of course a lot of people will forget that they have the coupons and never get around to using them. And a lot of the people won't actually own a gasoline powered car and will have to try and sell the coupons, probably for less than market value.

(And then most likely the price of gas in LA will go up for "unknown reasons" until most of the coupons have been redeemed.)

Re:This Warning Brought To You By Saudi Arabia

[gstoddart]

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?

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.

You don't think a massive lobbying, PR, and fake science campaign isn't an actual conspiracy?

Because, really, what they're doing is lying to the public, reaping billions in profits, and then claiming that everything they're doing is perfectly safe.

Which, of course, is increasingly proven to be bullshit.

Good article from the New Yorker on this

[Gandoron]

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.

Solution will be not to dispose waste in wells

[peter303]

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.