U.S. Geological Survey confirms: Human activity caused 5.7 quake in Oklahoma

reply to post by Phage

Hi Phage, I am curious what other industries or practices utilize injection wells? I googled it with no good luck and suspect that fracking and it's related procedures are responsible for 90+% of injection wells,both currently and historically. I am guessing with that number but I can't find anything else that uses injection wells enough and may potentially contribute to the seismic activity.I do realize that wells were dug back in the day for oil drilling, but I think in recent years these wells have been used to not only facilitate the injecting, but using existing wells to store the water after it is processed. This is why I feel most injection wells these days are related to fracking.

reply to post by speculativeoptimist

Class I wells inject hazardous and non-hazardous wastes into deep, isolated rock formations that are thousands of feet below the lowermost USDW.

Class I wells are used mainly by the following industries:

Petroleum Refining
Metal Production
Chemical Production
Pharmaceutical Production
Commercial Disposal
Food Production
Municipal Wastewater Treatment

water.epa.gov...


One of the first earthquakes to be associated with injection wells occurred in Colorado in 1961. Long before fraking was in use.
geosurvey.state.co.us...

reply to post by Phage


I just found that fracking has been used since 1949, I did not know.

Hydrofracking was first used by the natural gas industry in 1947, when the Stanolind Oil and Gas Corporation experimented with the technique in the Hugoton field in Kansas. The following year, the Haliburton Oil Well Cementing Company received a patent for the “hydrafrac” process which they first used in March 1949 on wells in Texas and Oklahoma2.

energy.wilkes.edu...
It is my understanding that many of these existing wells from the past are now(past 10 years) used to store/dump the water used in fracking, so I would submit from my armchair that fracking seems significantly more responsible for seismic activity than any other practice mentioned regarding the injection wells.
Thanks for the info

ETA: Looking at your article I see the percentages broken down:
22% hazardous wells
48% non-hazardous wells
30% wastewater disposal
I stand corrected…I think. Now I wonder if any regulation abuse is happening and the non-hazardous wells are being filled with spent fracking water? But that's another subject. I will turn down my suspicion volume….. for now.

reply to post by speculativeoptimist

Right, 1961 was before fraking was in common use and the well in question had nothing to do with oil or gas production.
My point was that it is not the fraking process which is being discussed. It is wastewater injection wells.

Such injection wells have long been associated with earthquakes (as have other human activities).
www.bssaonline.org...
earthquake.usgs.gov...
geosurvey.state.co.us... 1970-2ND%20FOLDER.pdf

Here's an interesting one:
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov...

You also have to understand that our current government politicizes everything top to bottom. Just because the USGS might have been nonpartisan and very sound in the science in the past doesn't mean it still is now. Currently, the drive is to shut down as much fossil fuel energy production as they can, so any science they can use to claim risk will be tied however tenuously to that risk just as everything is tied to Global Warming.

reply to post by Mamatus


then quit driving a car.
then you will not be
contributing to the use of crude oil.

put your money where your mouth is . . .

Mamatus

The United States Geological Survey (USGS) issued a press release yesterday indicating that the magnitude 5.7 earthquake that struck Prague, Oklahoma in 2011 was unintentionally human-induced.

The USGS claims that the magnitude 5.0 earthquake triggered by waste-water injection the previous day “trigger[ed] a cascade of earthquakes, including a larger one, [which] has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from waste-water injection.”

U.S. Geological Survey confirms: Human activity caused 5.7 quake in Oklahoma

This is great news! Perhaps the Fraking industry will now be held accountable for earthquake induced damage. I have known that fraking is not only bad for the water but bad for the planets crust. Simple logic dictates that if one cracks the rocks a mile deep that stability will be affected.

Does this count as Human Induced Climate Change? Seems it should be as when when starts having quakes where none were previously present.



BTW I tossed in the climate change thing just to wind up the deniers.

Great article - thanks for bring it to our attention!

The title of the article is misleading - deliberately, I believe! It should read 'Fracking caused quake' - not 'human activity', which leads to the assumption, and thus apparent validation, of 'global warming / climate change' theory, for those who don't read it properly.

The scariest part of this article for me was this sentence: Injection wells are considered by some to be the most environmentally sound method of disposing of waste-water — which is a byproduct of both hydrofracking and conventional oil production — because they use the earth itself to both filter and contain the pollution.

WTF do we think we are doing?

speculativeoptimist
reply to post by Phage

 

Hi Phage, I am curious what other industries or practices utilize injection wells? I googled it with no good luck and suspect that fracking and it's related procedures are responsible for 90+% of injection wells,both currently and historically. I am guessing with that number but I can't find anything else that uses injection wells enough and may potentially contribute to the seismic activity.I do realize that wells were dug back in the day for oil drilling, but I think in recent years these wells have been used to not only facilitate the injecting, but using existing wells to store the water after it is processed. This is why I feel most injection wells these days are related to fracking.

edit on 7-3-2014 by speculativeoptimist because: (no reason given)

previous thread which I had on waster water injection sites ... Estimates from the article say about 30 trillion gallons????

waster water injection

2nd paragraph does not this statement read :

[which] has important implications for reducing the seismic risk from waste-water injection.”

If your having smaller quakes aren't your releasing the energy in the ground to prevent a much larger quake when it would naturally occur?

This is just more proof that big business is the most destructive force on the planet.

reply to post by BABYBULL24


Nope, it doesn't quite work that way due to the logarithmic scale of quake scales; of which there are a few.

You can prevent large earthquakes by making lots of small ones, or by "lubricating" the fault with water
FICTION: Seismologists have observed that for every magnitude 6 earthquake there are about 10 of magnitude 5, 100 of magnitude 4, 1,000 of magnitude 3, and so forth as the events get smaller and smaller. This sounds like a lot of small earthquakes, but there are never enough small ones to eliminate the occasional large event. It would take 32 magnitude 5's, 1000 magnitude 4's, OR 32,000 magnitude 3's to equal the energy of one magnitude 6 event. So, even though we always record many more small events than large ones, there are far too few to eliminate the need for the occasional large earthquake. As for "lubricating" faults with water or some other substance, if anything, this would have the opposite effect. Injecting high- pressure fluids deep into the ground is known to be able to trigger earthquakes—to cause them to occur sooner than would have been the case without the injection. This would be a dangerous pursuit in any populated area, as one might trigger a damaging earthquake.

Earthquake Facts & Earthquake Fantasy

I didn't say it - the story said it will reduce seismic risk...think you want a bunch of 3's & 4's as opposed to one 8 or 9...

Phage
I understand the requirements for Breaking Alternative News. That doesn't excuse distortions in headlines or the text of the article. Such distortions are not conducive to denying ignorance.

Correct, and totally agree. I noticed the disparity between this thread title and the USGS statements right away when I went to the USGS article. Had the OP instead done that and published the USGS title, this is what we would have seen:

"2011 Oklahoma Induced Earthquake May Have Triggered Larger Quake"

A quite well known scientist commented to me recently that they appreciated those at ATS who really dug for the truth. I was shocked because frankly, I didn't know they read ATS- but apparently they do- if only occasionally on specific matters of concern.

So let's not start letting them down now, shall we? This reminds me of the trumped up, highly exaggerated Drudge headline about "Russia fires ICBM at west" or something like that. When it turns out that Russia had this test long planned, does them regularly, and notified everyone of it.

The moral of the story here folks is dig deeper. Squeeze the truth out, cause if you don't, one of us here will.

The curious thing about this report to me though is, about a thread I did here a while back, and the persistent seismicity at The Geysers in GA- a geothermal facility. It was about exactly this- the potential of induced seismicity triggering a nearby fault- and a dangerous fault at that. I'll dig it up and post it if I can find it. Cause I believe this USGS study now lends particular credence to that possibility. Interesting!

Yep, there it is-
www.abovetopsecret.com...

I found a few links to more solid instances of legal action or statements by..ahem...well known people. You can't make it up on the first one..

Biden blames fracking for earthquakes

The next one is a situation where fracking is being blamed for thousands of quakes just south of me in Arkansas. This is also within a couple hundred miles of the New Madrid Zone on some of it. (Not IN it...but close enough to make me a little uncomfortable for our profound LACK of understanding for subsurface interactions and forces in general.

BHP Billiton settles with homeowners over 'fracking damage'

Then a couple families who aren't settling just yet....

Fracking Blamed for 'Thousands of Quakes'

As they say, the jury is quite literally still out in this case(s). However, the same isn't necessarily true for voter attitudes.

Broomfield Passes Fracking Ban While Pro-Fracking Groups Sue

I'm as much with the reality of needing oil and gas as anyone. We also need to use the bountiful resources we have for Coal in this nation. Anyone who thinks China is a true reflection of what Coal plants are is simply following media. There are actually 2 coal fired power plants in this area and neither blow visible pollution at all, and I'll bet with this EPA, they put out lower actual particulate than ever before. It'll tear up some surface area, but the alternative of literally shattering the bedrock far beneath us and flooding it with toxins is simply not a viable thing IMO.

Even surface strip mining will be overtaken by nature in a short time and all but restored to natural states within generations. A long time...Indeed..but fracturing deep rock strata isn't generations of damage. It's FAR longer in timelines measured by geologic time frames. It's insane, IMO.

speculativeoptimist
reply to post by Mamatus

 

Despite this risk, authorities in Oklahoma continue to allow waste-water injection near the Wilzetta fault.

Oh well, guess the risk doesn't outweigh the rewards. It's just a few tremors, no big deal. My concern with these fracking operations is groundwater/table contamination in general but especially with these quakes occurring, potentially connecting the chemical treated water to a good water source. It is logically inevitable, no?
More links with other states cleaning tremors from drilling and injection.

Smaller earthquakes tied to oil and gas activities in the past few years have triggered bigger reactions in other states.

In Texas, Chesapeake Energy Corp. shut down two wells near the Dallas-Fort Worth Airport in 2009 after they were linked to much smaller, magnitude-3.3 quakes (Greenwire, March 11, 2010).

I don't believe that the big quake in Oklahoma could be caused by a water injection. We are about 125 miles away from that quake and it brought down ceiling fans, cracked sheetrock and knocked things around pretty good. So how can water put enough pressure on rock to make a quake strong enough to harm homes over 100 miles away?

Don't get me wrong I think fracking is a bad deal but I believe there is more to the story here. I have lived in Oklahoma for 53 years, the quakes just began here a few years ago, before that nothing. The gov. run quake reporting sites are dropping quakes off their reports too. Something besides fracking is going on IMHO