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Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat (bloomberg.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A Bloomberg article makes the case that the U.S. must consider the earthquake situation in Oklahoma a national security threat. The town of Cushing, OK is small — fewer than 10,000 people. But enough oil is stored there at times to eclipse the entire U.S. daily usage. "The oil in Cushing props up the $179 billion in West Texas Intermediate futures and options contracts traded on the New York Mercantile Exchange." In the wake of the September 11th attacks, government officials posted guards near the giant storage facilities; they're that important to the U.S. economy.
Unfortunately, the rising seismic activity in Oklahoma is putting those tanks at risk. The article argues that if a terrorist attack would threaten national security, so must an equally devastating natural disaster. This raises major questions for the legality of fracking, which has been linked to the increased number of earthquakes striking Oklahoma over the past decade. "Last month the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees oil and gas, ordered wells within three miles to shut down entirely and those between three and six miles from the town to reduce their volume by 25 percent."
Unfortunately, the rising seismic activity in Oklahoma is putting those tanks at risk. The article argues that if a terrorist attack would threaten national security, so must an equally devastating natural disaster. This raises major questions for the legality of fracking, which has been linked to the increased number of earthquakes striking Oklahoma over the past decade. "Last month the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which oversees oil and gas, ordered wells within three miles to shut down entirely and those between three and six miles from the town to reduce their volume by 25 percent."
Fracking may or may not be of negative environmental consequence, but it is the reinjection of production water into formations through SWD (salt water disposal) wells that is being blamed for the uptick in small earthquakes.
The floating top tanks are surrounded by earthen dams and the pipelines can be shut down almost instantly, so a disaster from earthquakes is pretty much FUD> don't panic.
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This raises major questions for the legality of fracking, which has been linked to the increased number of earthquakes striking Oklahoma over the past decade.
This isn't true. Even the EPA has been forced to admit that freaking is safe.
Pumping the used fracking water into wells might not be. When they do the drilling and fracking, they put chemicals in the water - some to make it slippery to aid in the fracking. There's no reason to believe they don't retain the same properties. Lubricate a fault line, don't be too surprised if it moves.
Fracking is almost certainly pretty safe. What I mentioned above might pose a problem. We've been doing fracking for a long time, and I think the big push now will be to research more environmentally safe or easily recyclable fracking fluid. Injection wells are just accidents waiting to happen.
Side note: After WW2, there was a lot of napalm left over, and they used it as a lubrication agent in fracking solutions for some time. I suspect a blowout could be pretty exciting.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.
Why did you include two links neither of which have to do with earthquakes?
Anyway, this isn't entirely accurate:
It's actually wastewater injection that's tied to increasing numbers of earthquakes. Now, fracking often uses wastewater injection. But other types of oil production sometimes do as well, and fracking doesn't always involve it. It's important to keep clear on just what the problem is.
"Oh, goodness. Look at my wrist, I have to go." "But what about your clothes?" "I don't love these."
I've looked into this -- to the extent of searching for papers and incidents described in the academic literature using Google Scholar, so take this with a grain of salt -- and I've concluded that there are two clear environmental concerns with fracking. The first, of course, is carbon. The lower the price of carbon-based fuel the more of it we'll use. All things being equal that would be a good thing, but the point is that all things are not equal if we emit more carbon.
The wastewater issue is complex, in that it depends on the locality and the stage of development of fracking in the area. Thus far the industry has been quite good about handling wastewater -- my concern is in some of the fracking boom areas there aren't good disposal options yet for "flowback". The industry is dealing with this by re-using flowback, but while this is great in the boom phase of fracking it's going to be hard to sustain in an area when the rate of new well drilling begins to peak. Eventually there'll be more flowback than can be re-used, and as far as I can see there is no plan for dealing with that in some places. This could potentially leave the taxpayers with the cleanup bill. You also have to factor in what practices an industry is willing to undertake in a boom situation as opposed to the eventual scenario of declining profitability.
This is not a crisis; it's something we have time to deal with if there's the political will. The problem is that there usually isn't much political will for dealing with problems that will manifest in fifteen or twenty years' time.
Groundwater contamination is also a serious concern, although it is clearly a matter of each site's local geology. It's an area that needs more research.
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Except if you live near oil producing areas using fracking and suddenly your well water becomes flammable:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/new...
http://ecowatch.com/2013/11/07...
So while there may be some hysteria, I damned well would be hysteric if my drinking water suddenly became flammable.
In fairness, it isn't the fracking process that is directly causing the earthquake problem here -- it is disposing of the wastewater in certain deep wells that is causing the earthquake activity. I read somewhere that ninety percent of the earthquake activity is associated with less than ten percent of the wells, which tells me that if we are able to choose which wells we use for wastewater injection we can substantially solve this problem.
Ohio has had a similar, if less serious, problem:
http://www.livescience.com/493...
For all that, this whole story sounds like we are watching a classic disaster movie unfold.
Did you read the summary? Its entire focus is that the recent earthquake swarm is caused by fracking (unlike the many similar earthquake swarms that area has had in the past, apparently).
I RTFA, and there might be some serious issues with it. It has some severe inconsistencies with the report it cites:
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com...
tl;dr version The report notes that increased fracking and the wastewater injection, if disposed in that manner, might be a problem. But the injection wells are the cause of the problem, not the nature of hydraulic fracking. Those injection wells have been there long before modern day fracking was around. Here's an abstract from Geology http://geology.gsapubs.org/con...
The takeaway is that the culprit here is injection wells for wastewater, which by the way, is not only loaded with brine water, and toxic chemicals, but lubricating agents. It was proobably never a good idea, even when these injection wells were utilized well before modern day fracking - like the culprit wells in Oklahoma.
As noted before, we need to make the fracking fluid more environmentally benign. It won't ever be completely so, as brine is picked up in drilling. But simply pumping it back underground will just expose local fault lines over the years, and endangers a whole lot of folks and real estate.
The shepherds did so well protecting the flock that the sheep no longer believed that wolves existed.