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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."
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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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.
How can I believe you when you tell me what I don't want to hear?
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?
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
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.