Guest post by David Middleton
Wow! I woke up Friday morning to news that a 2.0 Md earthquake struck about a mile and a half from my office. I was sleeping at home, about 7 miles from the epicenter, and it didn’t even wake me up. Thirty years as an exploration geophysicist, and I sleep right through my first earthquake!
That morning, I arrived at work and found my office in total disarray – So the quake didn’t do any damage… 
Now… I have yet to hear any journalists, politicians or college professors link this quake to fracking… But I figure they will. So I’ll just preemptively shoot that bit of junk science down. Fracking can trigger extremely minor earthquakes. A 2.0 Md quake is in the realm of possibilities. However, there aren’t any active wells within a 5 km radius (Davis et al., 1995) of this particular quake.
Now that I’ve preemptively debunked that bit of junk science, let’s go to Ohio. Every morning I like to check the Real Clear Energy website. It’s a nice compendium of energy news and also includes a fair bit of AGW nonsense. So it’s often a good source for blogging material. Well, this bit of nonsense caught my eye…
So, I clicked the link to the Scientific American article and this is what I saw…
At least they had the scientific integrity to mention that the quake was likely triggered by the wastewater injection well and not actually triggered by the fracking.
The Oklahoma Geological Survey recently examined (Holland, 2011) the possible relationship between a swarm of micro-quakes and a fracking operation in Garvin County OK. They concluded that the fracking could have triggered the 1.0 to 2.8 Md temblors. However, the quakes were so insignificant that it was almost impossible to precisely locate the hypocenters. The quakes could have been within 5 km of a fracking operation, they could have been small enough to have been triggered by the fracking operation and they occurred right after one fracking operation. However, the area has frequent seismicity of similar magnitude and no other fracking operations in the field’s 60+ year history have been correlated with induced seismicity.
After a bit of modeling, Holland was able to place the hypocenters of the temblors along a fault, within 5 km of an active fracking operation.
Holland’s conclusion was that there was a 50-50 chance that these micro-quakes were triggered by the fracking operation in the Picket Unit B Well 4-18.
One person reported feeling these quakes. Md 1.0 to 2.8 quakes are Category I on the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale…
You have to get up to more than Md 3.5 before quakes deliver “vibrations similar to the passing of a truck.” The non-palpable seismicity that might result from fracking is less than that of a seismic crew shooting a survey. Fracking can’t cause larger quakes…
Oklahoma Earthquakes Stronger Than Fracking Tremors, Experts Say
By SETH BORENSTEIN and JONATHAN FAHEY 11/ 7/11
WASHINGTON — Thousands of times every day, drilling deep underground causes the earth to tremble. But don’t blame the surprise flurry of earthquakes in Oklahoma on man’s thirst for oil and gas, experts say.
The weekend quakes were far stronger than the puny tremors from drilling – especially the controversial practice of hydraulic fracturing.
[…]
The magnitude-5.6 quake that rocked Oklahoma three miles underground had the power of 3,800 tons of TNT, which is nearly 2,000 times stronger than the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.
The typical energy released in tremors triggered by fracking, “is the equivalent to a gallon of milk falling off the kitchen counter,” said Stanford University geophysicist Mark Zoback.
In Oklahoma, home to 185,000 drilling wells and hundreds of injection wells, the question of man-made seismic activity comes up quickly. But so far, federal, state and academic experts say readings show that the Oklahoma quakes were natural, following the lines of a long-known fault.
“There’s a fault there,” said U.S. Geological Survey seismologist Paul Earle. “You can have an earthquake that size anywhere east of the Rockies. You don’t need a huge fault to produce an earthquake that big. It’s uncommon, but not unexpected.”
[…]
In the past, earthquakes have been linked to energy exploration and production, including from injections of enormous amounts of drilling wastewater or injections of water for geothermal power, experts said. They point to recent earthquakes in the magnitude 3 and 4 range – not big enough to cause much damage, but big enough to be felt – in Arkansas, Texas, California, England, Germany and Switzerland. And back in the 1960s, two Denver quakes in the 5.0 range were traced to deep injection of wastewater.
[…]
Holland, who has documented some of the biggest shaking associated with fracking, compared a man-made earthquake to a mosquito bite. “It’s really quite inconsequential,” he said.
Hydraulic fracturing has been practiced for decades but it has grown rapidly in recent years as drillers have learned to combine it with horizontal drilling to tap enormous reserves of natural gas and oil in the United States.
About 5 million gallons of fluid is used to fracture a typical well. That’s typically not nearly enough weight and pressure to cause more than a tiny tremor.
Earlier this year, Holland wrote a report about a different flurry of Oklahoma quakes last January – the strongest a 2.8 magnitude – that seemed to occur with hydraulic fracturing. Holland said it was a 50-50 chance that the gas drilling technique caused the tremors
[…]
So… Fracking can’t cause significant earthquakes and Seth Borenstein can actually write an article without parroting the alarmists.
References and Further Reading
Davis, S.D., P.A. Nyffenegger & C. Frolich. The 9 April 1993 Earthquake in South-Central Texas: Was It Induced by Fluid Withdrawal? Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. Vol. 85, No, 6. pp. 1888-1895, December 1995.
Frolich, C. & E. Potter. Dallas-Forth Worth earthquakes coincident with activity associated with natural gas production. The Leading Edge. Vol. 29, No. 3. pp. 270-275, March 2010.
Holland, A. Examination of Possibly Induced Seismicity from Hydraulic Fracturing in the Eola Field, Garvin County, Oklahoma. Oklahoma Geological Survey Open-File Report OF1-2011. August 2011.
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Truly; words to live by.
Then there are these folks whose concern are those minor ‘tremors’ (you do like your iPhone and iPad right?)
SEISMIC ISOLATION SYSTEM WITH CONVERTIBLE
ACTIVE AND PASSIVE MODES USING LINEAR MOTORS
FOR MONOCRYSTAL PULLERS
13th World Conference on Earthquake Engineering
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Brad says:
January 11, 2012 at 12:59 am
Well, I guess I will have to go with the real scientists. In general fracking does not cause significant quakes, but it is new and has not been well studied and in certain geologic formations it may, and probably does.
I read through your first link. It was in the NY Times and I did not see one reference to “real scientists.” I ignored the rest. I tend to go trust the opinion of someone who has first-hand experience (30 years experience in geophysical exploration) than a NY Times article.
Brad says:
January 11, 2012 at 1:14 am
A study showing Barnett Shale waste injection wells as a “plausible cause” for earthquakes:
There was a discussion recently about “plausible.” I don’t remember if it was here, but it might have been at CA. You should review the discussion (and the definition) before you use the term to suggest it means anything significant.
Peter Kovachev says:
January 11, 2012 at 4:46 pm
“Fracking, shmacking. The bottom line is, whatever promises to supply affordable energy leading to an upsurge in the economy is the enemy. We know that coal and oil are going to bring global warming which is going to destroy us all. Previous “balmy times” (if we can find them on flattened hockey stick graphs) were good for people, but this time, no. Because we said so. Of course we know that nuclear is the horror of all horrors, so we can’t have that either. Now gas,
well, that one was ok when there didn’t seem to be all that much of it…until this damnable fracking. Uh, oh. Wait, let’s see…earthquakes! Yes, that’s it, earthquakes and poisoned wells, and…and gas surging through Ma’s kitchen faucet. We can’t have that either, or at least, we need to study it…a lot and for a long time.
Now, some of you may puzzle over why wind turbines and solar panels aren’t being given a hard time, when we know that they are wasteful, inefficient, expensive, destructive and downright ugly. Simples: They don’t work all too well, so they can stay for now, until they’re all that’s left, most everyone has died off and then we can go after them. ”
_______________________________________
You’ve been paying attention.
I think these minor earthquakes in NE Ohio were caused by global warming. 11,000 years ago there were glaciers in that area, and if it wasn’t for global warming, they would still be there. That part of the country has been slowly lifting since the last great ice age. Thank God for global warming.
If Obama wins in 2012, is an EPA ban on fracking probably to follow?
Gold and dollar stores get a bigger boost?
GeologyJim, you say that fracking liquids are made of water, sand and other “benign stuff”.
Going to quote wikipedia here, but: “The 2011 US House of Representatives investigative report on the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing shows that of the 750 compounds in hydraulic fracturing products “[m]ore than 650 of these products contained chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or listed as hazardous air pollutants” (12). The report also shows that between 2005 and 2009 279 products (93.6 million gallons-not including water) had at least one component listed as “proprietary” or “trade secret” on their Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) required Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).”
Doesn’t really sound like they’re benign.
You SLEPT through it? And you call yourself a geoscientist?
Mr Luther Wu: I do try. Unencumbered by a single scientific bone, gaping and scratching me poor head over those squiggly lines and big words all you kind folks here use, I can try to help things along by serving up the roasted peanuts, wiping the beer rings and keeping a jaundiced eye on the bill they’re sticking us with.
He is probably basing his estimate on the earthquakes in Denver in the 1960s that were caused by disposal of waste water at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal NE of Denver. Yes there were some cracked foundations, as R. Gates points out, but the disposal was quite deep (20,000 feet is what I recall) and at very high pressure to get the injected fluids to move. In oil fields one injects generally to maintain field pressure, to replaced removed fluids, and so one is not over-pressuring a formation and thereby exploring uncharted territory with regard to pre-existing fractures that carry residual stress. After the inadvertent Denver experiments, the USGS and Chevron Oil carried out a research program at the Rangely field in Western Colorado for many years. They found that they could induce earthquakes at will and shut them off by cycling underground fluid pressures through a critical value–small earthquakes, though.
A magnitude 2.0 earthquake is very difficult to feel. I felt several when I lived north of Portland Oregon, and I noticed them only because it was late at night, all of the door hinges in the house creaked simultaneously, and it set the neighborhood dogs to barking. A magnitude 3.8 earthquake in 1984 up at Easterbrook, Wyoming cracked some foundations down at Golden, Colorado, some 200miles away. Local geology is all important for determining what small earthquakes might do. The current fuss over earthquakes and frac’ing or injection is highly opportunistic, though.
From the Nature / Scientific American article: “…a liquid-waste-disposal project in Colorado in the 1960s, where an injection of 631,000 cubic meters triggered earthquakes of magnitude up to 5, the largest yet seen as a result of fluid injection.”
I felt one of these jolts (there were thousands of them, apparently) in late afternoon, some 15 miles from the Rocky Mountain Arsenal where they were doing the waste injections. I was home from high school, sitting on a couch with my hand resting against a wall, and I remember having the initial impression that a truck must have driven across our lawn and hit our house. It was a loud “bang”, followed by some rocking and secondary jolts that gradually subsided. A bit scary, but also kind of interesting; it was over in half a minute.
As the article suggests, the jolts around Denver and Commerce City (felt all the way up into the foothills above the city) were traced to waste fluid injections. I gather that some others, like myself, are concerned more with pollution issues than with the quakes themselves, (as some have suggested, the lubrication may actually mitigate against some larger, natural events by relieving pressure build-up). I think the 64,000 dollar question is still what the fracking fluids and waste water injections do (or will do in the future) to the aquifer and other subterranean water systems. It’s very reasonable to keep asking this question here and elsewhere, and even pushing back against companies that do not appear to be acting with measurable and transparent caution. Why, for example, should these companies not provide exact formulas and concentrations of the materials in their fracking fluids? They claim that no pollution will occur from their drilling, so it would seem reasonable to expect them to voluntarily provide (in secret if they wished) samples of these fluids to be held by some government entity until the drilling was concluded, and it were clear that all the injections and closed wells were stable and not migrating. If pollution were later detected, specific companies could be held accountable.
How strange it was, after the Deepwater Horizon event, to watch as some of the worst effects of oil on the ocean ecosystem simply disappeared. The currents in the gulf helped disperse them, and bacteria, so we were told, helped to break harmful components down. A contamination of a freshwater aquifer would likely present more difficult problems, some of which would not be so easily resolved.
“and perhaps deep CO2 sequestration”. There is a Non-starter I can’t believe has gotten any traction what so ever. What a waste of perfectly good CO2. I would rather see it made into corn flakes, barley malt and beer any day! More CO2… More Sugar!
Don’t tell me that even a 30 year O&G G&G guy has given up on correcting the atrocious use of “fracking” or worse yet “frakking”!
Folks, there’s no “k” in the word “fracture.” The proper spelling is “fracing” and no, it doesn’t matter how many times some airhead with with a journalism degree from Columbia mis-spells it.
Full disclosure – 37 years O&G G&G here, and counting…
@Mike C,
Guilty as charged. It looks like it’s spelled wrong without the “k.”
Guilty as charged. I gave up on “fracing” a long time ago. To be really accurate, it should be written as a contraction: frac’ing. But, grammar, spelling and punctuation have never been high priorities in the writing of drilling reports and scout tickets… 😉
Fracking has been a common well completion practice for about 60 years… The only new thing is that it that lots of wells are being drilled in places that are unaccustomed to drilling and production activities.
Your first link isn’t about fracking…
Your second link isn’t about fracking either…
Nor was your third link related to fracking…
The salt water is not a byproduct of fracking… Or at least, very little of it is a byproduct of fracking. Most of it is a byproduct of oil and gas production.
Injection wells can induce ~4.0 Md quakes under the right conditions… There’s nothing new about that. The companies that drill and operate wastewater disposal wells need to do a better job of locating and monitoring those wells.
The extraction of oil and gas can also induce ~4.0 Md quakes under the right conditions. The ideal practice is to inject wastewater into depleted oil & gas reservoirs.
In the interests of “full disclosure,” it would be in my personal financial interest to see the shale plays killed. I’ve worked the Gulf of Mexico since 1988. The shale plays have devalued GOM gas reserves to the point that they are almost a liability.
I’ve slept through a lot of <2.0 Md quakes in the DFW area. I was in the process of writing the post about the Ohio quake when the Dallas one happened… So, I threw in the tongue-in-cheek intro.
The media reporting of the quake has been hilarious. I'm amazed that they haven’t tried to link it to fracking, although the local ABC affiliate seemed to be blaming George W. Bush and Mark Cuban for it… Bush’s Fault
No. It’s like saying that eating a banana can’t cause the guy behind you to slip & fall; but carelessly tossing the banana peel over your shoulder can cause him to slip & fall.
That’s the worst part about the shale plays. I love picking and mapping faults… I’d go crazy if I was supposed to look for boring structural geology… 😉
The Barnett is in Texas… It has nothing to do with the Ohio quake… Nor did it have anything to do with last week’s Ohio quake.
Eola Field is the only example I could find, of nearly palpable earthquakes being sort of tied to an actual fracking operation.
Yep.
That’s what I posted.
That was the point of my post. However, the mainstream media continues to tie the Ohio quake to fracking…
Horrible reporting…
The Ohio quake was not caused by “a different part of the [fracking] process.” It was triggered an entirely different process.
“That does not mean that people should stop digging holes or extracting valuable resources — especially those that could have real environmental benefits,” is just a flat-out idiotic statement. If fracking is inherently hazardous from an induced seismicity perspective, the green-ness of natural gas relative to coal is irrelevant. If the hazard is inconsequential, the green-ness of natural gas relative to coal is irrelevant to the value of the mineral resource.
What causes earthquakes is the fact that the earth’s crust in scale is much thinner than the skin of an apple, and the apple underneath the skin is a fluid in motion, heated from within (or possibly by CO2 due to climate change).
Friction within the skin itself prevents earthquakes until the pressure build to such a point that you get a catastrophic release of pressure, resulting in a loss of life and property.
Injecting water into the crust has been shown to reduce friction, reducing the magnitude of the earthquakes while increasing their frequency.
Would you rather have a 0.1 earthquake every week, or an 8.0 earthquake every 100 years?
So, can fracking cause an earthquake? Not one that wasn’t already scheduled to happen. All fracking can due is deliver the earthquake sooner, before it has built up to full pressure.
The ideal that fracking is something new from an earthquake point of view is of course nonsense. Large scale water injection has been used for resource extraction and waste disposal long before the introduction of fracking.
The real danger of fracking is that it poses an economic threat to other energy production industries that are now trying to use environmental fears to limit competition.
geoff says:
“The 2011 US House of Representatives investigative report on the chemicals used in hydraulic fracturing shows that of the 750 compounds in hydraulic fracturing products “[m]ore than 650 of these products contained chemicals that are known or possible human carcinogens, regulated under the Safe Drinking Water Act, or listed as hazardous air pollutants” (12). The report also shows that between 2005 and 2009 279 products (93.6 million gallons-not including water) had at least one component listed as “proprietary” or “trade secret” on their Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) required Material Safety Data Sheet (MSDS).”
Doesn’t really sound like they’re benign.
You are correct, but its all relative. Nearly all petrochemicals fall into these same categories, and because the oil companies are trying to recover petrochemicals, the formation fluids that naturally occurs in the rocks where fracking takes place usually contain more than enough petrochemicals to also fall into these same categories. In many cases, the formation fluids contain greater concentrations of cancer causing compounds (benzene, toluene, xylene, etc.) than the fracking fluids themselves. This is why water from oil wells is re-injected back underground, usually into depleted oil wells. Water that comes up with oil is a “characteristic hazardous waste”, and the best place to dispose of it is back underground in the same formations it came from.
Further to what Hooffstetter says to geoff: Mere detection of the existence of a compound/molecule in produced water from an oil/gas well does not equate to a human-health concern.
It (toxicity) all depends on concentration and EXPOSURE. Given the abundant controls/regulations on the storage, handling, and disposal of industrial fluids (which applies to water produced in oil/gas operations), there is no credible pathway that leads to widespread human-health risk. Wells are cased and cemented, usually do a depth of several hundred feet, to reduce potential interaction with shallow groundwater, which may be locally used for drinking
Zero-exposure thinking here is as irrational/meaningless as zero-tolerance policies in (e.g.) schools. Both remove any influence of common sense in making meaningful decisions.
And to R Gates: the Denver earthquakes did not produce $millions damages – mostly broken windows at and near the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, minor damage to unreinforced masonry (parapets, etc), and some loose stuff falling over. The whole thing was more interesting from the science angle than the damage angle