Tuesday, March 26, 2013

Fracking earthquakes


And not just from fracturing the bedrock below. Now we have to worry about the large quantities of water disposed of back into the ground by the frackers and others in the drilling business.
A 2011 Oklahoma earthquake has been tied by researchers to the disposal of wastewater from oil production, the latest study suggesting the energy boom from advances such as fracking is increasing temblors.

A series of quakes in November 2011 followed an 11-fold bump in seismic activity across the central U.S., as disposal wells are created to handle the increase in hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for oil and gas, geologists at the University of Oklahoma, Columbia University and the U.S. Geological Survey said in the journal Geology today.

The wastewater that triggered the earthquakes came from conventional wells in the Hunton formation, said Katie Keranen, assistant professor at Oklahoma and co-author of the report. The findings are a cautionary note for disposal of the millions of gallons of fluids from hydraulic fracturing, she said.

“It has little to do with where the water comes from,” Keranen said in an interview. “What really matters is how you’re getting rid of the water.”

A spate of earthquakes in the central U.S. in recent years is “almost certainly” man-made, and may be caused by oil-and- gas wastewater disposal, U.S. Geological Survey researchers said a year ago. For the three decades until 2000, seismic events in the nation’s midsection averaged 21 a year. They jumped to 50 in 2009, 87 in 2010 and 134 in 2011.
They are increasing in number and size, but fracking is harmless, it's those darn rocks down below that are the problem.

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