New Concerns Over Earthquakes In Oklahoma Near Vast Oil-Storage Facility (nytimes.com)

HughPickens.com writes: The NY Times reported on October 14, 2015 that a magnitude 4.5 quake struck Saturday afternoon about three miles northwest of the Cushing Hub, a sprawling tank farm that is among the largest oil storage facilities in the world, now holding 53 million barrels of crude with a capacity for 85 million barrels. The Cushing oil hub stores oil piped from across North America until it is dispatched to refineries. The Department of Homeland Security has gauged potential earthquake dangers to the hub and concluded that a quake equivalent to the record magnitude 5.7 could significantly damage the tanks and a study by Dr. Daniel McNamara study concludes that recent earthquakes have increased stresses along two stretches of fault that could lead to quakes of that size. "It's the eye of the storm," says Dana Murphy, vice chairman of the state's oil and gas regulatory body, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission.

"When we see these fault systems producing multiple magnitude 4s, we start to get concerned that it could knock into higher magnitudes," says Daniel McNamara, author of a paper published online that a large earthquake near the storage hub "could seriously damage storage tanks and pipelines." "Given the number of magnitude 4s here, it's a high concern."

Comments

Carbon Sequestration

[NReitzel]

We have seen that the relatively minor amount of water injected into the ground during fracking operations tends to induce earthquakes.

Carbon dioxide under pressure (supercritical CO2) is a solvent that is at least as good as water, and sequestration proposals call for pumping gigatons of liquid carbon dioxide underground, into the same kind of strata that once held oil. Does anyone think that this will not tend to induce earthquakes?

Releasing oil from a storage area would cause an environmental mess - some would use the word catastrophe, I would not. Oil on the loose mucks up agricultural areas, sometimes makes for fires that kill a few dozen people and wildlife. These are minor effects.

A release of multiple millions of tons of carbon dioxide would be an actual catastrophe. Look up "Lake Nyos" and observe that a natural release of CO2 managed to kill 100 people and thousands of livestock, not to mention hundreds of hectares of crops and wildlife, all in a very sparsely settled area. And that was from a very minor release.

What I fail to understand is that the very same people who eschew nuclear power because the waste products "Will be dangerous for centuries" don't have a concern about storing vast quantities of carbon dioxide underground. If the radiation release at Chernobyl had been carbon dioxide instead, it could have left all those people who were evacuated dead in their homes before anyone could worry about sending them elsewhere. RadWaste is dangerous for hundreds of years, stored carbon dioxide is dangerous forever,

Let's think twice about how to "fix" carbon emissions.