USGS: Oil and Gas Operations Could Trigger Large Earthquakes 171
sciencehabit writes: The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has taken its first stab at quantifying the hazard from earthquakes associated with oil and gas development. The assessment, released in a preliminary report today, identifies 17 areas in eight states with elevated seismic hazard. And geologists now say that such induced earthquakes could potentially be large, up to magnitude 7, which is big enough to cause buildings to collapse and widespread damage.
Update: 04/23 15:56 GMT by T :
New submitter truavatar adds: At the same time, the Oklahoma Geological Survey released a statement explicitly calling out deep wastewater injection wells to Oklahoma earthquakes, stating "The OGS considers it very likely that the majority of recent earthquakes, particularly those in central and north-central Oklahoma, are triggered by the injection of produced water in disposal wells."
Maybe so but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
Re:Maybe so but... (Score:4, Informative)
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.
Re:Maybe so but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling
But not bp or exxon corporations?
Stop Lying (Score:2, Insightful)
They're not shell corporations; they're legitimately owned and operated by other parties, who gladly take the profit.
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They're not shell corporations; they're legitimately owned and operated by other parties, who gladly take the profit.
I thought you were talking about politicians for a second.
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Good luck getting a penny in compensation out of the corporations responsible if this happens.
They are already smart enough to use shell corporations to do the drilling -- by the time water contamination or triggered earthquakes are discovered, the shell company is long done and a new one has taken its place.
There is plenty of blame to go around. Townships, Counties, States, Cities, all require permits and licensing of some kind before drilling begins and they are supposed to monitor said drilling. Hell, I can't cut down one sapling on my own property without permits from the county and state (proximity to water). The purpose of the permits is to limit and control land/water usage (regardless of property ownership rights). So if you want to blame anyone, start with the ones issuing the permits.
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Agreed. However, you have to remember that when you have to get a permit to cut down a sapling, it's a minor inconvenience. When a large drilling operation has to go through these permits, it's a huge inconvenience that costs money and jobs. We have to protect these job creators and get the government off their backs so they can get things done.
At least that's what I heard on Fox News.
I always love these "small government" types. They're the first to yell about how we need smaller government. But when
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The city of Denton in Texas banned fracking within city limits through a public proposition. The oil companies, with full support of the state, sued the very next morning saying that the city had no jurisdiction to ban fracking. A couple hours later, the Texas Land Commission filed its own lawsuit challenging the ban. Some localities are trying to do right, but the next level up in the government is completely in the pocket of the oil companies. Some of state reps are not even paid for, they gladly whore th
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No, they should go after the leadership of the parent/contracting corporations. They were the ones that made the decision to drill, they're the ones who should be held responsible when it goes badly.
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More to the point, they who make the profits should also get the risks.
Re:Maybe so but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Then again, if these are already areas of 'elevated seismic hazard', it's quite possible that inducing the plates to slip now will prevent an even larger quake in the future.
Geoengineering is a new science with great unknowns; we should not approach it without caution, nor should we assume anything we do is bad.
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"There were more earthquakes of magnitude 3 or higher in Oklahoma last year than in California. Several were of a magnitude greater than 5 and caused considerable damage."
We are talking about areas that until recently have been considered geologically stable. Don't you think that the USGS have taken that into account?
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We are talking about areas that until recently have been considered geologically stable
The fact that we were recently wrong about the stability of the area isn't really relevant. The drilling couldn't add enormous amounts of energy to the substrata, in the form of stresses that required shifting enormous amounts of rock to release, so you have to assume that the stresses were already present. When or how would they have been released without the drilling is an important question, but they would have been released eventually. Is this way of releasing them better or worse? I don't think we know
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I guess someone thought that they didn't,
especially when you notice that there are a LOT more quakes now.
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It's not drilling, it's pumping very high pressure water into the cracks in the earth to release the gas. That's what fracking is, it is using water pressure to "crack" open the rock to release the natural gas.
So you're suggesting that the pumps are adding enough energy to move millions of tons of earth and rock? Really?
That's nonsense. All they're doing is breaking loose enormous energies that were already there.
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Is this way of releasing them better or worse? I don't think we know that.
Let me guess, you're also a "climate skeptic"?
Not at all. Why do you ask?
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611 quakes in 2014
111 in 2013
40 in 2012
77 in 2011
65 in 2010
22 in 2009
Something is going on and it's definitely looking like the oil industry is involved, especially when you compare the above map with this one, http://strangesounds.org/wp-co... [strangesounds.org]
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Fail my ass, look at the data and you see there are far more quakes in the past 2.5 years then in all the years before.
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This is so laughably false I'm amazed you even tried to push such a logic. Please stop asking people to prove a negative.
Geoengineering is something you are referencing with no knowledge; an increase in seismic risk is exactly that.
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No, he's certainly right in the long term. The only source of the energy needed for earthquakes is geological, and that power source (plates moving against each other) adds energy at a fixed rate (on human timescales). It's just a matter of when and how the energy is released. Triggering it early, when it otherwise wouldn't have caused an earthquake in our lifetimes, or perhaps in humanities lifetime as a species, that you can blame on someone, but eventually that stored power is going to be released.
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Well yes they are actually. Earthquakes are the result of underground movement due to stresses at faults overcoming the forces holding the ground in place. If you lubricate joints to reduce the forces holding them in place the net energy caused by underground movements remain the same, the only difference is the release is small and often vs large and rare.
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Then again, if these are already areas of 'elevated seismic hazard', it's quite possible that inducing the plates to slip now will prevent an even larger quake in the future.
Geoengineering is a new science with great unknowns; we should not approach it without caution, nor should we assume anything we do is bad.
Then again, if these are already areas of 'elevated seismic hazard', it's quite possible that inducing the plates to slip now will prevent an even larger quake in the future.
Geoengineering is a new science with great unknowns; we should not approach it without caution, nor should we assume anything we do is bad.
No.
Niagra falls pushes back a lot of rock each year. Maybe it keeps more rock from breaking off all at once! Yes, but odds are if you had no Niagra falls the rock would stay for a much longer time.
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Well it isn't like consumers benefit at all when they have access to cheap energy sources.
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They can use it to run a camp stove, while sitting in a tent near the ruins of their house.
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Actually, the chances of winning a lawsuit are probably pretty good although a cynic might suspect that the lawyers will be the big winners. One thing though. If there are sufficient stresses built up for a magnitude 7 earthquake, doesn't that suggest that there will eventually be a 7.1 or 7.2 or greater quake when nature decides in her own inimitable way to relieve the accumulated stresses without human help?
Think about it.
In the meantime one wonders what drillers are going to do with zillions of gallon
This Warning Brought To You By Saudi Arabia (Score:1)
and... OPEC!
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Dammit, I came in here to give the 3-2-1 countdown to the launch of the denialist movement for this...beaten :-(
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Whats funnier is that there are people who think the government doesn't act for political reason.
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Re:This Warning Brought To You By Saudi Arabia (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't think the oil and gas industry hasn't spent millions of dollars to try to say that fracking is perfectly safe and couldn't possibly cause any harm?
Basically they've done what the tobacco industry did .. delay, obfuscate, and claim that it's up to someone else to prove it's dangerous while they assume it's safe without evidence.
You don't think a massive lobbying, PR, and fake science campaign isn't an actual conspiracy?
Because, really, what they're doing is lying to the public, reaping billions in profits, and then claiming that everything they're doing is perfectly safe.
Which, of course, is increasingly proven to be bullshit.
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Fracking has been going on for nearly 50 years.
But now...NOW, it's causing earthquakes.
I see.
What is your alternative hypothesis? (Score:3)
Fracking has been going on for nearly 50 years.
But only fairly recently has it been employed in large scale in the relevant area. It wasn't economically feasible in lots of cases due to the availability of much easier and cheaper sources of oil and gas.
But now...NOW, it's causing earthquakes.
Apparently so. Do you have evidence of an alternative reason for earthquakes to go from 2/year prior to 2008 up to over 2/DAY in 2013?
I see.
So you are skeptical? That's fine. Have you looked at all the evidence and found a plausible alternative hypothesis we can test?
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But only fairly recently has it been employed in large scale in the relevant area. It wasn't economically feasible in lots of cases due to the availability of much easier and cheaper sources of oil and gas.
Apparently so. Do you have evidence of an alternative reason for earthquakes to go from 2/year prior to 2008 up to over 2/DAY in 2013?
It's not the fracking per se, it's the deep well injection of waste water. True, fracking creates waste water that usually gets disposed of by injecting it into deep wells, but in the subject case 4/5ths of the waste water comes from old regular wells. Apparently the cost of oil is high enough that it is worth it to go after oil that is contaminated by water, extract the water, and sell the oil.
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Plate tectonics unclear in Oklahoma (Score:2)
But there an ancient boundary where the huge 1812 quakes occurred in Missouri.
Plate boundaries are a tautology (circular definition): they are defined by linear zones of seismic it's; in turn they define the most likely future quake locations.
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Behaving as expected (Score:3)
You don't think the oil and gas industry hasn't spent millions of dollars to try to say that fracking is perfectly safe and couldn't possibly cause any harm?
Of course they have. You'd have to be living under a rock with your fingers in your ears to think otherwise.
Basically they've done what the tobacco industry did .. delay, obfuscate, and claim that it's up to someone else to prove it's dangerous while they assume it's safe without evidence.
More or less, yes this is exactly what they are doing. The playbook is almost identical. Claim that there is insufficient proof, ask for more studies (funded by them frequently), hire "experts" to promote their viewpoint, hire politicians to hinder any regulations, etc. Take the tobacco PR playbook, scratch out tobacco and write in fossil fuels and that is almost exactly what they are doing.
You don't think a massive lobbying, PR, and fake science campaign isn't an actual conspiracy?
I thin
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Consider though that foreign companies have just as much interest in proving it's bad. They'd really rather that we did not become oil independent. It screws with their economics. Science now days does not follow the scientific method. If you have enough money and/or political influence the "scientists" will say whatever you'd like. You're welcome to stand up for the truth if you want, but only if you're willing to forego government grants, your reputation, and any hope of working for anyone other than
This message brought to you by (Score:2)
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Deep in their heart of hearts most people are happy to have cheap gas to heat their homes.
TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Of course the first ones to ignore externalized costs are the business offloading those costs on everyone else. And if a magnitude 7 quake gets triggered and people get hurt or killed (potentially dozens or hundreds of people in the US and possibly many more in less developed areas) the corporations responsible ought to be liable for millions or billions of dollars. But if necessary they'll lawyer up for a fraction of the cost and drag the issue out in court for years until everyone forgets. After all, how do you prove that this particular quake wouldn't have happened without drilling? And how do you prove which company's actions triggered the quake?
Re:TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think we're poor at evaluating externalized costs. I think we're just very damned good at completely ignoring them, attacking anyone who tries to remind us of them, and undermining any kind of political or social solutions that might be brought forward. We are easily lead by the nose by those willing to tell us what to hear. We're cowards.
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Why is it exactly you assert the options are binary? Please elaborate.
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Because there is no mythical free energy machine that is producing power with no negative aspects. So, since you care so much about the negative aspects of power generation, I encourage you to turn off your main circuit breaker and live in the dark.
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Because the only energy available anywhere is fossil fuels. Yup, there is no alternatives whatsoever.
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Did I say anything about Fossil Fuels? Don't put words in my mouth. There is no power generation method without some kind of tragedy of the commons (externalized costs).
Nuclear - Waste
Hydro - Land destruction/fish extinctions
Solar - High Land use/nasty chemicals in fabrication
Wind - Dead birds/rare earths used in construction with all the poisoning that involves
Tidal - Removing energy from the tides which effects tidal species
Please, show me the mythical free energy method you developed that doesn't have
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All of the methods used to extract power from those things have negative environmental effects, yes, see my other reply for a breakdown.
http://slashdot.org/comments.p... [slashdot.org]
Comment removed (Score:4)
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So I've read that what's happening is the proverbial "straw that broke the camel's back". Meaning all this activity only hastened the inevitable; an earthquake. Some geologists have stated that in hindsight, this may actually be a good thing in that it releases stress that would otherwise buildup and cause an even bigger quake at a much later date. Much MUCH later I would think. So I dunno, if a mag 7 goes off, could you really prove who or what caused it though??
Do you have a cite for this? I haven't heard anything like that.
Re:TANSTAAFL (Score:5, Interesting)
A lot depends on how much the resource extraction did to actually cause the quake at that moment.
Most geological features are extremely massive and not so precariously balanced, but there are exceptions to that like faults.
If the quake was going to happen eventually anyway, and all we did was hasten it a few years or a few decades, the reality is that the extraction determined the time of the incident, but did not cause the actual build up of energy. All you did was move up the quake schedule.
In that way, you may have caused it to go off with less energy and that could be helpful. An example would be much like those folks who use surplus artillery pieces to cause controlled avalanches so that an inevitable avalanche is allowed to come down predictably and with a little bit of control.
Do I think resource extraction is working that way? Certainly not, because we're not planning extraction in that way. What we're doing now is shooting artillery at the snow pack for other reasons and not really caring where it comes down or when. If they even believe that it will come down at all to begin with.
Still, I would be careful about assigning blame to extraction companies for big killer earthquakes. The fact is that your big earthquakes are dealing in colossal forces. If they were balanced so finely that extraction could set them off, you can be pretty sure that that earthquake was coming anyway. It's sort of like drilling a well and accidentally releasing buried Cthulhu. Sure, you released a Great Old One, but let's face it, if he was that close to the surface, *somebody* was going to do it eventually. You can't just stop drilling wells just because you might possibly release unfathomable forces from outside of Time and Space. Such forces tend to take care of themselves.
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If the quake was going to happen eventually anyway, and all we did was hasten it a few years or a few decades [...]
Or a few centuries?
I mean, you're going to die anyway, right? So what's the big deal if it's tomorrow during an earthquake or in 50 years from natural causes?
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Depends on how much extraction can actually affect things, but I'd say that the longer it was before the quake was "supposed to happen", the less likely it would be that an extraction event could cause it.
In other words, can we actually undermine 100 years worth of stability with what we are doing now? I don't actually know, but I do know that geologic forces tend to be measured in terms that make human capabilities look positively Mickey Mouse.
In places like California, a magnitude 7.0 earthquake is a les
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So I dunno ...
“therein lies the rub”
~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet
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yeah nobody else ever benefits from the products produced and sold by any company.... The reality is it is a cost/risk worth taking to enjoy the benefits of these products.
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What is the burden of proof in the US for this sort of thing? Balance of probabilities? Seems like with the USGS saying it is likely you could probably get over that 50% chance limit. Who decides, a judge or a jury?
Re:TANSTAAFL (Score:4, Insightful)
Earthquake hits LA, does major damage. Oil and gas companies are taken to court in a class action lawsuit. (There's a lot of oil production here, especially around Long Beach.)
The case drags on for years, but eventually the companies have to settle, let's say for $10 billion. That sounds like a lot of money right? Except half of it goes to the lawyers. Then half of the rest is made as a tax deductible donation to the Red Cross for disaster relief. The remaining 2.5 billion is split amongst the approximately 18.5 million residents of greater Los Angeles. Which would come out to a little under $150 per person. And it's delivered in the form of coupons for 50% off your next 100 gallons of gas. That 2.5 billion will of course go into a fund until those coupons are redeemed, and i would be surprised if the companies responsible don't get to keep the interest on those funds until they're spent to reimburse the gas stations that redeem the coupons. And of course a lot of people will forget that they have the coupons and never get around to using them. And a lot of the people won't actually own a gasoline powered car and will have to try and sell the coupons, probably for less than market value.
(And then most likely the price of gas in LA will go up for "unknown reasons" until most of the coupons have been redeemed.)
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This and David and Goliath.
How deep are the pockets of the plaintiffs?
Law suits are the cost of doing business.
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Trigger is slightly different than create (Score:1)
I would have thought people would be happy to have a bunch of small mostly inconsequential earthquakes instead of one large damaging one every few years.
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Do we really know that all of the earthquakes triggered by this process will be small and inconsequential?
We don't really understand why injecting lots of wastewater into deep wells is causing earthquakes. One hypothesis I have heard is that the compressed wastewater is lubricating faults and making them more likely to release. But that is just one hypothesis. Without understanding the precise mechanism causing these earthquakes we can't really be certain that they will always be small earthquakes.
Natura
Trust the US government (Score:1)
Unfortunately this announcement comes from the executive branch of the US government. Many of us have developed zero trust in anything coming from DC.
Facts support themselves (Score:3)
Unfortunately this announcement comes from the executive branch of the US government.
So what? Either the facts support the claims or they do not. Who it is from is irrelevant to its veracity. There is a reason we insist that scientific findings be repeatable so that others may confirm the findings. The fact that a government agency is involved is irrelevant to the scientific process.
Many of us have developed zero trust in anything coming from DC.
So even if what they are saying is actually true, you plan to dismiss it out of hand because you dislike government in general. This in spite of the fact that you provided no actual reason to dispute the co
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Science is done by humans. Science therefore is political, agenda driven, fallible, biased
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Science is done by humans. Science therefore is political, agenda driven, fallible, biased
Humans are all of those things. The scientific method is by far the best technique we have developed to minimize those issues. The success and technology of our modern civilization validates the effectiveness of the scientific method every day.
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Wrong!
Engineering is the basis of such success, and that employs different methodology than scientific method. We do not design and build by the scientific method though it is part of the foundation
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Engineering is nothing without the science behind it. My point still stands. The scientific method is the best technique we have to minimize human failings.
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Wrong again, engineering sucessfully done FAR before the scientific method ever formalized. There are massive structures a thousand years and older still standing on solid engineering without a shred of scientific method employed but rather pure engineering principles.
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So what about the report coming from the government of the state of Oklahoma, which says basically the same thing?
The really cool part of this... (Score:2)
...is that the oil and gas companies were enthusiastic participants in the study, providing the data. Their rationale was one of enlightened self-interest, I'm sure: THEY don't want to get sued if they cause an earthquake, and the USGS analysis will tell them where/how it's safe to drill.
(My source is an interview on either NPR or BBC World News, which I can't find a link to at the moment)
Say "Hello" (Score:1)
Good article from the New Yorker on this (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... [newyorker.com]
Until 2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand. This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of magnitude 3.0 or greater.
The first case of earthquakes caused by fluid injection came in the nineteen-sixties. Engineers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a chemical-weapons manufacturing center near Commerce City, Colorado, disposed of waste fluids by injecting them down a twelve-thousand-foot well. More than a thousand earthquakes resulted, several of magnitudes close to 5.0. “Unintentionally, it was a great experiment,” Justin Rubinstein, who researches induced seismicity for the U.S.G.S., told me.
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So what, all the quakes are tiny. A mag 4 is nothing
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No, those occassional > 5 quakes were just normal for Oklahoma. Look and their history, 6+ and 7 quakes since 1800. You can't blame those on fracking, just the many little ones
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If a corporation is causing two "little" earthquakes a day, it is still a cause for concern and a moratorium on the activity that causes the earthquakes until reasonable policy choices can be made.
Wrong way to look at it... (Score:3, Insightful)
This hypothesis can be tested (Score:3)
Let's try injecting water into some California fault, safely out in the desert, to see if a major fault can be moved using this technique. I know that the state doesn't have any water to spare at the moment, but we can use treated wastewater or other "junk" water for the experiment.
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Just don't forget to insert the non-public mixture of highly safe chemicals mix into the water.
It might speed up the rock erosion compared to just plain high pressurized water.
Coming Home to Roost (Score:2)
Now they're creating earthquakes.
The chickens have come home to roost.
Interesting that the OGS would take a such a stand (Score:2)
given the power of oil companies in Oklahoma. Here is one interesting article:
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... [newyorker.com]
that discusses how they keep control over drilling.
Thanks Tea party (Score:1)
Drill baby, drill!
Longtime non oil problem in Colorado (Score:2)
-rocky flats manufacturing waste disposal1960s
-farm irrigation waste disposal Rifle 2000s
-coal mine waste water Trinidad 1990s
Shouldn't be a big problem (Score:2)
if it's really from wastewater disposal. It should be pretty easy to find an alternate way to dispose of wastewater. Filter it and reuse it or pump it into a big pond and let it evaporate.
Solution will be not to dispose waste in wells (Score:4, Insightful)
Play the Terrorist card (Score:2)
A thought (although surely not unique): Pit the industry that is doing this, against our beloved lawmakers. Suggest that terrorists could use this methodology to cause damaging earthquakes that could potentially kill people. Any politician that rolls their eyes at this suggestion is surely to have the ridicule and damnation of their peers visited upon them, because they're not anti-terrorist and pro-america... right?
renewable energy from biomass (Score:1)
Maybe the time has finally come for large-scale transportation fuel production from biomass pyrolysis [battelle.org].
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Why not also end federal prohibition of a crop with a byproduct ("hurds") containing more than seventy-seven percent cellulose [jackherer.com]. It also chokes out weeds and can be grown on marginal land.
maybe someone should read the article (Score:1)
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And here come the psuedo-skeptics to attack anyone who even dares suggest what is in the interests of commercial entities may not entirely be in the interests of the wider society. I mean, God would never allow a universe to exist where humans could fuck themselves over. God wants unconstrained industries doing whatever the fuck they want, and we should just go and fucking kill anyone who ever even hints that maybe unconstrained resource extraction might possibly kind of potentially cause problems. Environm
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For every idiotic and hyperbolic action, there is an equal and opposite idiotic and hyperbolic reaction.
So look at the crap you constantly spew here and tell me you are surprised you get the opposite crap right back in your face.
Oh, I see...YOU are always right,
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Oh, and Al Gore rapes bunnies!!!!!
Not anymore.
He has moved onto cherubim.
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Oh, and Al Gore rapes bunnies!!!!!
I come here for news, not for a reference to a youtube video that everyone has seen.
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Actually there has been damages. read up on it. http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... [newyorker.com]
This is due to water injection wells as a result of fracking and other oil/gas drilling.
-G
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the only place in the world where you can get an earthquake and a tornado on the same day now.
Sounds like we have a follow up to Sharknado! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt27... [imdb.com]