In a state where many believe the Earth is 6000 years old, a study that claims the faults haven’t moved for 300,000,000 years will be taken with a grain of salt, and a ton of religious fury.
I grew up in the area. I'm sure some of that will happen, but it is also BLATANTLY obvious to the people living there that something has changed. I have relatives that have lived in the area for 70+ years who had never experienced a single earthquake ever until less than 10 years ago, and now suddenly there are earthquakes once a month or more. They know something is up, and whatever their religious beliefs, they also know it started happening at the same time as the fracking equipment rolled in.
This heading (and the heading of the article itself) are wrong. If you read the article it is not that "drilling" reawakens sleeping faults, but that deep injection wells do. Deep injection wells are one way to dispose of produced water from oil and gas production.
So it's not "drilling" that is at issue, but injecting water for disposal that awaken faults.
Actually there are only two major methods of drilling both include injection of a product. For core drilling you inject water/"mud" to remove cuttings and for RC you use air pressure to remove cuttings. Injection is intrinsic to drilling. I'm yet to hear of a deep hole rig that doesn't use injection.
So yes it is the drilling that is the problem.
Note: I worked on drill rigs for half a year punching holes to 1.6km.
The science to date has linked the quakes to deep salt water disposal wells lubricating faults. These wells are taking flowback and produced water from oil wells once they are put on production. The earthquake phenomenon is not related to circulating "mud" during drilling.
No doubt the science has linked that to it, but you also regularly fill faults whilst drilling for core or hell even when drilling water bore holes. If the grounds crap you just pump mud with some additives in till the holes are blocked or your at least retain some pressure. I'm gonna throw it out there also, having worked amongst it most drillers/holes that are drilled...we know piss all about whats going on down there. Hell we had one hole that was LITERALLY within 50m of the side wall of an open cut mine, we drilled down past the open cuts depth from surface because our targets were for next to segments of the underground mine that went off the open cut. We lost water pressure/return for a good week, had to cart loads in and mix it plenty thick to try and plug the hole. Few weeks into the job, the other offsider went for a walk in a direction we didn't usually go for a piss, about 100m away he came across all our drilling fluid forming a small lake in the windrows above the open cut. Geologists had no clue why it had happened or why we had lost water in the first place leading up to that discovery.
The point is, drilling sure as shit isn't an exact science, you should probably be more skeptical about its effects than not. Most drillers aren't some highly educated academic that knows exactly whats going on down hole...most of them have been hired because they have the mechanical aptitude to fix just about anything that can go wrong with a rig or have the perseverance to push through the horrible conditions, both above ground and down hole to get the job done. Drilling be it through the process itself or the result of its action definitely plays a role in the problem.
So to reword the title to be accurate in your eyes would
> Current Drilling Techniques Reawaken Sleeping Faults in Texas
work? The injection of water is part of how they currently operate, if there are other ways for them to drill then society should decide whether the increased costs are worth it but... how they currently drill is causing this issue.
That's incorrect; as the OP said, how they drill is not the alleged issue.
I think you mean how they "produce". Two completely separate things. There are many production methods. Wells can be drilled in several ways, and several different kinds of production can happen on them.
Since science is now establishing a connection between drilling (or rather reinjection) and quakes, these outfits ought to be required to buy EQ insurance before they are allowed to drill, but enough to cover all restitution costs.
How do you determine that that specific earthquake was directly caused by reinjection? Is it possible that reinjection is creating more frequent, smaller quakes, and avoiding stress buildup that would be released as a larger quake later? Do they get credit against the latter for the former? Is there an amount of earthquake insurance available commercially to cover "all restitution costs"?
You don't. It's a general fund paid in by all operators in an area. The funds should be sufficient to cover necessary indemnification.
Sure, the small quakes likely are relieving bigger ones tens of thousands of years hence, so we don't care about that.
The rules would be, you want to drill and re-inject to make some money, make sure it's profitable enough that you can pay into an EQ indemnification fund. Actuaries would set rates.
I agree with this. The model would be the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. The idea is all drillers pay an excise tax into a fund, and this fund acts as insurance for anyone who can show damages by an earthquake in a drilling area.
You need lots of tracking equipment, lots of claims for damage and finally lots of lawyers. It's the lawsuit way of doing society, case by case.
Think of all the lawyer salaries and the great boost to the economy!
We do similar for flood insurance. These quakes are not the devastating kind. They range in the <M4 scale, so it'll be mostly toppled chimneys and adornments, perhaps some brick walls might collapse. The damages are typically in the "minor", possibly escalating to "moderate" but not "major", so there would not be armies of lawyers trawling for claimants. But this is still a nuisance which needs to be addressed for property and infrastructure owners as well as an incentive for the industry to find better solutions to disposing drilling water byproducts.
RICO has very specific conditions to be invoked, so no. And to the wider question about liability - maybe? It seems more likely that it will be followed by civil suits where the standard of proving guilt is lower, and where each plaintiff can make their own case.
And what exactly will the damage claim amount to? I'm yet to find any evidence in reporting regarding any actual damage beyond some small cracks and broken plates.
In areas with heavy fracking (e.g. northern Pennsylvania around Dimock) there are trucks from companies like GeoKinetics and Halliburton everywhere and they are purposely trying to create mini earthquakes to get access to the shale. It is pretty common knowledge that there have been more tremors and seismic activity since fracking started. As far as damage reports go, the gas companies (and I assume also the oil companies) ensure every settlement includes a nondisclosure agreement so that no one can talk about the damage if they want money. This is why so many homes no longer have safe drinking water, many people have fallen ill from cancers and similar ailments, and yet there is almost no reporting on it.
Source: I ran a site for a while where people posted images and stories of how natural gas drilling had ruined their lives or caused environmental harm. We would try to get as much info from people as we could before they signed the NDAs for the settlement money and never talked about it again
Ah looks like the lobbyists came to share some downvotes for information they didn’t like (or maybe a normal user from oil country?)
I can’t imagine why someone would downvote factual information that adds to the discussion. The downvote option wasn’t added so people could hide comments they disagree with. I’ve personally met dozens of people who’ve signed NDAs with natural gas companies but live in denial if you insist.
Original downvotes possibly because your source is your interpretation of information collected from laypeople who were about to take money for silence. That's not strong evidence.
Further downvotes likely because your tone is defensive and you throw around wild accusations.
In other words, you presented weak evidence then violated community norms in responding.
However, I would love to check out your site, to see if there's useful information regarding this thread on it. Can you share a URL?
It can vary. When earthquakes happen due to the drilling and reinjection, it can obviously displace the ground which could destroy the roads or buildings located there.
Below the surface, the earthquakes and changes in pressure from adding and removing fluids/gas from the ground often cause the aquifer water to mix with the fracking fluids or shale gas causing it to be unusable.
I must have missed it, was there some multi-billions-in-damage quake caused by reinjection? I suspect the lack of consequences will simply be due to the fact that they haven't caused enough damage for it to be worthwhile.
The reality is that quakes are treated by the anti-drilling lobby as a proof of "me am play gods"[1]. A sign from above/below that we're angered mother earth. I think the more sober minded should realize that the important numbers when talking about "consequences" is not how angry mother earth is, but the quakes' cost in terms of damage and human lives.
Well to be fair if you drill for a little while in an area and start experiencing earthquakes then one might naturally wonder whether more drilling will lead to even more problems.
The roads in most of the fracking areas are terrible and its often hard to pinpoint whether damage was caused by heavy fracking trucks simply driving on these small roads frequently versus seismic activity versus something else. That doesn’t mean there isn’t damage, it’s just difficult to account for and externalized.
More significantly, there are major changes inside the earth that occur. If you pump a bunch of poisonous fracking fluids into the ground and then drill out a bunch of shale, you’ve replaced a solid layer of shale with fracking fluids and air. Naturally things can mix more since there isn’t a tough layer of shale. The shale is normally pretty close to the aquifer layer which means you now have seismic activity mixing your fracking fluids and shale remnants with your drinking water. Just because the layman may not immediately see the consequences, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And in most of the big fracking areas there are enough houses without drinkable water that people know something bad is happening even if they can’t pinpoint the exact mechanism. If you drive around those areas, you’ll notice many houses with what are known as water buffalo tanks outside to provide their house with drinkable water. Typically the gas company pays for these because the families in the area have threatened lawsuits or other action after their houses lost drinkable water.
Wrong title. Poor management of salt-water injection, NOT drilling, fracking, et all, may lubricate certain types of fault lines in sedimentary deposits.
Part of the problem is the Obama-era EPA did not allow companies to write off dry-holes, leading to a shortage of wells that can be used for salt-water injection. This put a stress on the existing injection infrastructure.
