United States Geological Survey confirms it: Fracking Causes Earthquakes and not just in Oklahoma

United States Geological Survey confirms it: Fracking causes earthquakes: The United States Geological Survey (USGS) isn’t known for being controversial. It’s a collaborative, interdisciplinary organization that studies “the health of our ecosystems and environment, [and] the natural resources we rely on.” It’s been studying the effects of fracking on the underground since we started doing it, and members conduct their studies with an eye to increasing America’s GDP. Entities all around the world, from cities to whole countries, have issued moratoria on fracking pending conclusive evidence of its risks. Well, some of that evidence (full text, PDF) is in: fracking causes earthquakes. http://pubs.usgs.gov/of/2016/1035/ofr20161035.pdf Amazingly the document has been remover from the USGS website. Corruption much? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence We’ve actually known how injecting pressurized fluids into the ground can cause earthquakes since 1969, when Chevron let the USGS use one of its Colorado wells to practice figuring out the exact fluid injection pressure required to cause earthquakes. “There were a lot of doubts expressed by very good petroleum engineers that [earthquakes caused by injection wells] were even possible,” said Bill Ellsworth, a geophysicist from Stanford who came to the USGS while the Colorado experiment was in progress. “Knowledge of the whole physical process was either lost or had not been effectively communicated to a broad community.” The scientists at the well had it fine-tuned; above a particular threshold of fluid pressure in the well, earthquakes began, and below that threshold they stopped. It works a little bit like how an air hockey table floats the puck on a cushion of air. Under sufficient pressure, a cushioning layer of fluid can force its way between two sides of a deep strike-slip fault, lubricating both sides and releasing the shear stress. That’s an earthquake. When fracking waste fluids are pumped back down below the shale for what we hope will be safe disposal outside the groundwater system, we are pumping those fluids into porous rock, which requires high pressure. At the required pressures, the waste fluids can fill up the porous bedrock and open up otherwise stable faults. Texas and Oklahoma, long known as oil country, are at the literal epicenter of this problem. Until 2008, there had never been an earthquake recorded in the Dallas-Ft. Worth area, which sits atop the Barnett Shale, a natural gas deposit second only to the Marcellus Shale in size and importance. The first wells were drilled there in 2002, and since 2008, they’ve had almost 200 quakes. Oklahoma has it worse: in 2014 their earthquake rate was greater than California’s, and in 2015 they had 890 earthquakes. The USGS uses the phrase “earthquake swarms” to describe the clusters of earthquake activity caused by industrial activity in this area. They’ve tied sharp upticks in seismic activity to fracking activity in eight states. The increasing activity prompted two unusual warnings, jointly issued by the USGS and the Oklahoma Geological Survey in 2013 and 2014, that Oklahoma had a significantly increased chance of seeing a damaging earthquake of up to magnitude 5.5. Robert Williams, the USGS coordinator for earthquake hazards in the central and eastern US, said “It was the first time I think we’d ever issued an earthquake advisory east of the Rockies.” Earthquakes induced by fracking are different than natural quakes, according to the USGS, in “source, frequency, propagation, and ground shaking characteristics.” (Source, here, denotes not just cause but also the depth of the epicenter.) Induced earthquakes are shallower, tend to stay below 5.5 in magnitude, and tend to swarm. Evidence suggests that the risk of induced earthquakes can persist for years after the actual fluid injection stops. While local and state officials may be slow to react to scientific advance, the risk of induced earthquakes cannot be ignored. Earthquakes at that magnitude can do significant damage; the feature image of this story shows the aftermath of one quake that struck Oklahoma in late November, 2011. https://www.extremetech.com/extreme/225753-united-states-geological-survey-confirms-it-fracking-causes-earthquakes New Details Revealed In State Earthquake Hearings http://m.news9.com/story.aspx?story=36778039&catId=112032 https://www.pbs.org/newshour/science/earthquakes-triggered-by-fracking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009%E2%80%9317_Oklahoma_earthquake_swarms https://blogs.agu.org/geospace/files/2016/04/Cumulative_induced_seismicity.png https://sincedutch.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/craton-shale-plays-mashup-fracking.jpg https://insideclimatenews.org/sites/default/files/styles/colorbox_full/public/USCanadaFrackQuakes.PNG?itok=e54RDehA https://www.facebook.com/oppenheimerranch/ Support our work on Patreon here: https://www.patreon.com/OppenheimerRanchProject