Posted on 09/13/2016 3:05:23 PM PDT by Kaslin
People in seven states, from South Dakota to Texas, were awakened Saturday morning, September 3, by Oklahoma’s most powerful earthquake in recorded history. The 5.8 tremor was centered near Pawnee, OK. Several buildings sustained minor damage and there were no serious injuries.
That we know.
What we don’t know is what caused the quake—but that didn’t stop the alarmist headlines from quickly blaming it on “fracking.”
Green Party candidate Dr. Jill Stein promptly tweeted: “Fracking causes polluted drinking water + earthquakes. The #GreenNewDeal comes with none of these side effects, Oklahoma. #BanFracking”
A headline in Forbes stated: “Thanks to fracking, earthquake hazards in parts of Oklahoma now comparable to California.”
The Dallas Morning News proclaimed: “Oklahoma shuts down fracking water wells after quake rattles Dallas to Dakotas.”
NaturalNews.com questions: “Was Oklahoma’s recent record breaking earthquake caused by fracking?”
A report from ABC claims: “The increase of high-magnitude earthquakes in the region has been tied to the surge in oil and gas operators’ use of hydraulic fracturing, or fracking…”
Citing a March 2016 report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) on “induced earthquakes,” CNN says: “The report found that oil and gas drilling activity, particularly practices like hydraulic fracturing or fracking, is at issue. Saturday’s earthquake spurred state regulators in Oklahoma to order 37 disposal wells, which are used by frackers, to shut down over a 725-square mile area.”
Despite these dramatic accusations, the science doesn’t support them. The USGS website clearly states: “Fracking is NOT causing most of the induced earthquakes.” An important study from Stanford School of Earth, Energy & Environmental Sciences on the Oklahoma earthquakes, which I wrote about last year, makes clear that they are “unrelated to hydraulic fracturing.”
While the exact cause of the September 3 quake is still undetermined, geologists close to the research do not believe it is fracking related. (Realize 5.5 El Reno earthquake, centered near the western edge of Oklahoma City, in 1952 was from natural causes.) At a September 8 meeting on Seismicity in Oklahoma, according to Rex Buchanan, Interim director of the Kansas Geological Survey: “There was relatively little conversation about fracking and far more conversation about wastewater.”
William Ellsworth, Professor (Research) of Geophysics at Stanford University, told me that while no specific information about this direct case is available: “I don't have any information that would allow me to rule out fracking. However, it is extremely unlikely. Fracking occurs for a few days at most, if at all, when the well is being finished. Wastewater injection goes on continuously for years and years.”
The error in the reporting occurs, I believe, because people don’t generally understand the difference between drilling and hydraulic fracturing, and produced water and flowback water, and, therefore, merge them all into one package.
Yes, it does appear that the increase in induced, or human-caused, earthquakes may be the result of oil-and-gas development, yet totally banning fracking, as Stein and Hillary Clinton support, would not diminish the tremors.
First, not every oil or gas well is drilled using hydraulic fracturing. As Ellsworth mentioned, fracking is a part of the process used on some wells. However, much of the drilling done in the part of Oklahoma where the seismic activity first occurred is conventional and doesn’t involve fracking—which provided a premise for the Stanford researchers’ study.
When a well uses the hydraulic fracturing enhanced recovery technology, millions of gallons of water, plus sand and chemicals, are pumped into the well at high pressure to crack the rock and release the resource. When the oil or gas comes up from deep underground, the liquids injected come back to the surface too. This is called flowback water. That water is separated from the oil and/or gas and may be reused, recycled (as I wrote about in December), or disposed of in deep wells known as injection wells—which are believed to be the source of the induced seismic activity.
“Ha!” you may think, “See, it is connected to fracking.” This brings the discussion to produced water—which is different from flowback water.
This type of wastewater is produced at nearly every oil and gas extraction well—whether or not it is fracked. The water, oil, and gas are all “remnants of ancient seas that heat, pressure and time transformed,” explains Scott Tinker, Texas’ state geologist and director of the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology. He continues: “Although the water is natural, it can be several orders of magnitude more saline than seawater and is often laced with naturally occurring radioactive material. It is toxic to plants and animals, so operators bury it deep underground to protect drinking-water supplies closer to the surface.” In Oklahoma, the wastewater is often injected into the Arbuckle formation.
While the hydraulic fracturing process is typically only a few days, the produced water can be brought to the surface with the oil and/or gas for years. With the increased oil and gas extraction in the past several years—before the 2014 bust, the volumes of wastewater also soared. In parts of Oklahoma, ten barrels of wastewater are produced with every barrel of oil. Scientific American reports that some of those high-volume injection wells “absorbed more than 300,000 barrels of water per month.”
The authors of the Stanford study were “able to review data about the amount of wastewater injected at the wells as well as the total amount of hydraulic fracturing happening in each study area, they were able to conclude that the bulk of the injected water was produced water generated using conventional oil extraction techniques, not during hydraulic fracturing,” writes Ker Than for Stanford. Professor Mark Zoback, lead author of the study states: “We know that some of the produced water came from wells that were hydraulically fractured, but in the three areas of most seismicity, over 95 percent of the wastewater disposal is produced water, not hydraulic flowback water.” Ellsworth agrees. Last year, he told the Associated Press: “The controversial method of hydraulic fracturing or fracking, even though that may be used in the drilling, is not physically causing the shakes.”
So, if banning fracking won’t stop the shaking, what will? The geologists contacted for this coverage agree that more work is needed. While the quakes seem to be connected to the wastewater injection wells, there are thousands of such wells where no discernable seismic activity has occurred. Oklahoma has been putting new restrictions on some of its thousands of disposal wells for more than a year to curb seismic activity and that, combined with reduced drilling activity due to low prices, has reduced the rate of the tremors. In Texas, when the volumes of wastewater being injected into the vicinity of that state’s earthquakes were reduced, the earthquakes died down as well. Other mitigation strategies are being explored.
Jeremy Boak, director, Oklahoma Geological Survey, told me: “The Oklahoma Geological Survey is on record as concluding that the rise from 1-2 M3.0+ earthquakes per year to 579 (2014), 907 (2015) and the current 482 (to date in 2016) are largely driven by increased fluid pressure in faults in the basement driven largely by injection of water co-produced with oil and gas and disposed of in the Arbuckle Group, which sits on top of basement. Both the increase and the current decreasing rate appear to be in response to changes in the rate of injection. There are natural earthquakes in Oklahoma, but the current numbers dwarf the inferred background rate.”
Interestingly, most of the aforementioned reports that link fracking and earthquakes, ultimately acknowledge that it is the wastewater disposal, not the actual hydraulic fracturing, that is associated with the increased seismic activity—but, they generally fail to separate the different types of wastewater and, therefore, make the dramatic claims about fracking.
Boak emphasized: “There are places where there are documented cases of earthquakes on individual faults occurring very near and during hydraulic fracturing operations, including one published case in Oklahoma. These are generally small earthquakes, although some larger ones (M4.0+) have occurred in British Columbia. Therefore, it is technically very important to maintain the distinction between injection-induced and hydraulic fracturing-induced earthquakes, or we may take the wrong action to solve the problem. Should the OGS and Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) staff find further Oklahoma examples of such earthquakes, the OCC will take action. The current issue of injection-induced seismicity must take precedence.”
When you hear supposedly solid sources blaming hydraulic fracturing for earthquakes, remember the facts don’t support the accusations. Fracking isn’t causing Oklahoma’s increased earthquakes.
Oklahoma just magically happened to become an earthquake zone spontaneously. I know this because a government website told me so.
The Left has obviously not paid these scientists enough. Fork it over guys or we’ll actually stick to the truth!
Read the article carefully. Its generally not the fracking that causes earthquakes...its (maybe) injection wells. And most injection wells in Oklahoma dispose of fluids from conventional wells.
Ergo, when the media scream ‘fracking causes earthquakes’, they are not being honest.
What (may) have happened is that an uptick in oil production in Oklahoma due to a period of high oil prices caused more injection well use. That’s what ‘magically’ made OK an earthquake zone - not fracking my hair’s on fire fracking.
The enviros are human-chauvinists. Rather than extract vital energy at the risk of occasionally rattling the windows, they’ll have us frying birds in midair with solar collecters and chopping them to bits, eagles included, with windmills.
Just like climate change data, the errors in logic occur because people tend to evaluate results through recorded history rather than the span of history which is eons. Reliably recorded history in the US generally is about 250 years. In the area of Oklahoma, more likely 150 years.
BTW I went to the University of Oklahoma in the 70's and we had our share of earthquakes then in Norman, way before fracking.
did hillary pass gas there?
This is 100% correct. It’s not fracking that’s causing the earthquakes.
There are literally no earthquakes in Colorado, Wyoming, North Dakota, anywhere else that fracking is occurring.
The cause of all of it is the high pressure injection wells in the flint, limestone, and sandstone in Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas.
Most of these wells have a pressure of 1/2 psi per foot of depth, if you have a well that’s 4000 feet down, that’s 2000 psi fracturing this type of rock and causing the earthquakes.
But thanks to our good ol buddies at the EPA, (/s)
these wells are the only method they let these companies dispose of the brine used in these type of drilling.
Marita Noon writes an energy column published Sunday weekly in our local paper. She is well versed on energy matters and exposes the scams used by the eco-nuts in an attempt to make us exclusively independent of fossil fuels or nuclear power. Her columns can be found here:
http://energymakesamericagreat.org/
I felt last week’s OK earthquake...from around 250 mils away in Kansas.
I’m fairly confident that the trucks pumping injection fluid into the porous seam of rock didn’t collectively contain enough energy for me to get rattled 250 miles away.
Rather, I suspect that what is happening is more akin to a relay - the ‘low voltage’ injection process somehow clicks a terminal and releases the earth’s ‘high voltage’ energy - high energy which I can feel 250 miles away.
If I’m right, that means that the energy I felt last week was already in the earth, injection well or no injection well...and if left untriggered by wells, that energy could be stored as potential energy in the earth for another 10 or 20 years. Of course, when it finally was released 20 years from now, it may be considerably more energy by that time, and cause a lot more damage.
What my whacky theory is getting at is: maybe triggering earthquakes isn’t necessarily a bad thing.
The earth is coming closer to average tectonic activity levels than it has been during most of our lives.
Injection wells are irrelevant. Faults are locked in place by rock keys that couldn’t even be marked by hydrogen bombs.
Injection and fracking are to earthquakes as p!ssing into the teeth of a category 5 hurricane.
Geez Louise.
Drill pipe and some sand are not even noticed by the Earth.
Earth is spinning around close to 1000 miles per hour and gravity is doing the rest. I am so dizzy.....
Statistics show that fracking can cause *small* earthquakes. But this indicates that it can also *prevent* *large* earthquakes.
Earthquakes happen because of a build up in either tension or pressure. When enough energy has been built up, naturally occurring small earthquakes can actually transfer energy to a large fault, making its eventual movement greater.
However, when there is no great fault around, small earthquakes might release so much energy that the region is made more stable.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.