The U.S. has seen a precipitous increase in shale oil and gas extraction over the past decade that would be impossible without the coupling of two old technologies, horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing aka fracking. The courting and subsequent marriage of these two technologies took place in my Wise County Texas backyard.
Areas in the middle of America--Arkansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Ohio, Oklahoma, Texas and Virginia--that have been usually earthquake free have seen a significant increase in earthquakes during the past decade, which relates to the increase in fracking and injection of massive amounts of flowback and produced water.
A naturally-occurring rate change of this magnitude is unprecedented outside of volcanic settings or in the absence of a main shock, of which there were neither in this regionâ (Ellsworth et al, 2012). LinkA new study refers to the shale oil and gas boom as "fracking industrialization." I like that term. I used information from the study Fracking Industrialization and Induced Earthquakes: The Mechanisms that Connect the Disposal of Fracking Wastewater into Deep-Injection Wells to a Significant Increase in Midcontinent Seismic Activity for part of this blog post.
Updated with link to full study.
Fracking requires injection and injection causes earthquakes.
We have known since the 1960's that injection causes earthquakes. Fracking or injection under very high pressure of millions of gallons of water, a proppant and thousands of gallons of chemicals is required to produce oil and or gas from shale. Each fracked shale well, in turn produces wastewater that, 95% of the time, requires injection into a disposal well. Even CO2 injection for enhanced recovery from shale oil and gas wells has led to 48 earthquakes in Snyder,Texas.
According to former Mobil V.P. Louis Allstadt, Wells that are fracked produce 50 to 100 times more wastewater than conventional wells.
So when you talked about "the race for what's left," that's what's going on. Both the horizontal drilling and fracturing have been around for a long time. The industry will tell you this over and over again - they've been around for 60 years, things like that. That is correct. What's different is the volume of fracking fluids and the volume of flow-back that occurs in these wells. It is 50 to 100 times more than what was used in the conventional wells. Former Mobil VP warns of fracking and climate change.As of November 2013, approximately 100,000 fracking wells have been drilled or permitted in the U.S. In 2012, 22,326 wells were drilled and fracked in the U.S. 60% of those were in Texas. More than 95% of the wastewater from fracked wells is disposed of in injection wells because that is the cheapest way to get rid of it but we don't know if that's the safest way.
Industry knows that disposing of the massive amounts of toxic and radioactive waste is one of the biggest challenges of fracking. Brad Miller, General Manager of Regulatory Affairs for Anadarko Petroleum, expressed this at the industry psyops conference I attended and taped in 2010. In his presentation, Miller acknowledged that waste management is the biggest challenge for fracking.
Fracking is a farce we need to take care of waste water. We need to get ahead of this as an industry. EPA is going after this now. What happens to that frack water?A Few earthquake stats
Greenbrier, Arkansas
When the injection wells were shut in, the earthquakes tapered off and eventually stopped.
Oklahoma
Texas
During the 25 years prior to shale gas development in the Barnett Shale, there were no 3.0 or greater magnitude earthquakes. I've lived in Texas all my life and have no memory of an earthquake. Now, I've lost count there have been so many. Since shale gas development began there have been more than nine earthquakes measuring 3.0 or larger. (Several earthquakes larger than 3.0 M have occurred in North Texas in November and December since this study was released.)
In Texas the total amount of fracking wastewater being injected into deep disposal wells went from 46 million barrels (1.45 billion gallons) in 2005 to nearly 3.5 billion barrels (110.25 billion gallons) in 2011, representing a 76-fold increase in total fracking wastewater injection volume in a six-year period.Midcontinent
From 1970 to 2000, earthquakes measuring 3.0M or greater in the midcontinent area consistently averaged 21 per year. In 2011 the average is somewhere between 134 and 188.
A team of seismologists led by Nicholas van der Elst of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory found, that at least half of the magnitude-4.5 or larger earthquakes that have struck the interior United States in the past decade have occurred near injection-well sites LINKEast of the Rocky Mountains, earthquakes M 5.0 or grater were rare but between 2008 and 2011 there was and 11-fold increase.
Pretty much everybody who looks at our data accepts that these events were likely caused by injection (Behar, 2013).The states with the most injection wells according to 2010 EPA numbers are:
- Texas (52,016)
- California (29,505)
- Kansas (16,658)
- Oklahoma (10,629)
- Illinois (7,843)
Fracking causes earthquakes too
The point of fracking is to break rock.
Any time you are putting material into the ground, particularly under pressure, you are going to have the potential to break rock, says Robert Balch, a geophysicist at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socor SourceThere are 4 events during the fracking industrialization life cycle that can cause seismicity:
- drilling (residents report their windows rattling and feeling vibrations that can accompany new cracks in their homes)
- hydraulic fracturing which is injection (again, residents report vibrations)
- production of gas and fluids from the well Earthquakes in the Eagle Ford Shale are linked to extraction of oil and gas. So if you're removing fluids, it's changing the stresses locally. It's also changing the stresses on faults. So either removing or adding fluids can cause earthquakes.
- injection of wastewater
Dr. Cliff Frohlich, Associate Director of and Senior Research Scientist at the Institute of Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin, says that while just a year ago he would have never said fracking itself causes earthquakes, now he thinks differently. In the last year there have three well-documented earthquakes that occurred during the frack job and were probably related to fracking. SourceAccording to USGS's William Ellsworth, the largest earthquake caused by fracking was a 3.6 M, which he claims is "barely felt."
Rebecca Williams would disagree. There have been over 20 earthquakes in her area during the last two months. She contacted me when the earthquakes first began and I advised her to document the condition of her home. Rebecca likes to take photos of her home because it is was her dream home so she has before earthquakes and after earthquakes documentation.
"You can actually see my house rocking from side to side," Williams says. She was at home when the largest of the quakes (magnitude 3.6) struck on the evening of November 19th. "I tried to get up and run downstairs," she says. "And for a moment, I couldn't run, because the house was shaking so bad!" Source
On December 22, there was a 3.3 M earthquake and on December 23, there was another 3.3 M.
Here is an excerpt from a statement Rebecca wrote:
This past month we have experienced over 20 earthquakes that have shaken my home and caused my family extreme stress and sleepless nights. My 7-year-old home had no cracks before these quakes and now there are cracks in my brick, steps, driveway, across my porch and in a retaining wall. My dream home is crumbling around us slowly.In 2009, a North Texas earthquake caused $100,000 in damage to the Boy Scout Museum.
At least nine small earthquakes struck Johnson County between June 5 and July 13, 2012. A 2.7 quake hit March 10, centered about four miles northeast of Godley. It was the fourth small earthquake in North Texas since Feb. 24.In Texas, homes are not built to earthquake code, earthquake insurance is unheard of and largely unavailable and residents don't know where to log complaints when earthquakes hit.Cooke said Wednesday that the plaintiffs in the lawsuit filed Tuesday have "all had significant structural damage" to their property because of the earthquakes, and they believe the earthquakes are a direct result of fracking in the area.
"We Don’t Exactly Know What Is Going On Down There"
...we do not necessarily know where the injected wastewater is going, and what subterranean pathways it might be following, especially in relation to pre-existing faults both known and unknown. The second is that wells can, and do, fail and leak.Disposal of millions of gallons of waste requires injection sometimes in excess of 7,250 psi. Waste injection, too, has "the potential to break rock," which can accelerate the potential for waste to migrate and contaminate aquifers.Class II injection wells in practice do not have detailed geologic reviews performed, so there is not particularly any understanding regarding what the well opens up to as much as two and a half miles beneath the surface, including the location of possible faults. (Clarke et al., 2012).
Cliff Frohlich describes the wastewater as being forced “downward and outward” from excessive injection, adding that fracking’s toxic effluent “can meander for months, creeping into unknown faults and prying the rock apart just enough to release pent-up energy”What damage might these earthquakes cause to the already problematic wellbores and other drilling infrastructure like pipelines?
And there's the open question of what kind of damage these induced quakes can do to drilling infrastructure. It's plausible that the tremors could affect well integrity, Frohlich says. "In my business, you never say never. That said, most of the time these earthquakes are not right near the well. But it's possible an earthquake could hurt a well," he says, though he knows of no instances where that's occurred. SourceWho's your fracking daddy?
The oil and gas industry has narrowly defined fracking to mean only the moment they inject their fluids into the hole and fracking is over when they pull out. They are trying to dodge responsibility for the whole realm of descendant problems their actions create.
The industry is like deadbeat dads who, in this case, inject toxic fluids into a hole in the ground and walk away from responsibility for the consequences.
The public ends up paying while industry walks away with their profit.
Recommendations:
The report gave five recommendations to reduce probability of induced seismicity. I added a sixth recommendation.
(1) It is important to avoid injection into active faults and faults in brittle rock.
(2) Formations should be selected for injection (and injection rates should be limited) to minimize pore pressure changes.
(3) Local seismic monitoring arrays should be installed when there is a potential for injection to trigger seismicity.
(4) Protocols should be established in advance to define how operations will be modified if seismicity is triggered.
(5) Operators need to be prepared to reduce injection rates or abandon wells if triggered seismicity poses any hazard (Zoback, 2012).
(6) Hold industry financially and legally responsible for the damage caused by their operations at every stage and track their fluids from cradle to grave.
Or, we could scratch all of the above and go with this one recommendation:
FOR NORTH TEXANS:
Media Advisory: Railroad Commissioner David Porter Hosts Town Hall Meeting
to Discuss Earthquakes
Texas Railroad Commissioner David Porter will host a town hall meeting to discuss recent seismic occurrences in the North Texas area, at which he will listen to resident's concerns and outline what he plans to do as Texas Railroad Commissioner. Other state and local officials will be in attendance.
Date: Thursday, January 2, 2014
Time: 5:00 p.m. to 7:00 p.m. CST
Location: Azle High School Auditorium, 1200 Boyd Rd, Azle, TX 76020
Press contact: Katie Carmichael, 512-463-8870
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