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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Well, fracking is not primary, so my favorite theory is still alive. That our heliosphere is compressed, the end of the recurring 5,000 y cycle in which the gas cloud Fluff enerngizes with neutrino input and is squeezed down to normally past Earth toward the sun. At that point it is exposed to cosmic rays and expansion. Compression would cause earthquakes as the small pores are closed up in Earth. If the Maya are right, our compression ends with 2012 and our heliosphere once again reaches to Pluto only we have some really hot gas planets that will be felt by our solar primary which is going to give us some horriffic weather, if nothing else.
I come from a region full of traditional natural gas supplies. So as a direct consequence, it is my job to try to discredit fracking. If fracking is allowed to continue, it will dilute the supply of natural gas, harming the economy of my province. So…. You must be crazy. Of course fracking causes earth quakes. It also causes natural gas to contaminate the ground water. Fracking must be stopped now!!!
Mike C wrote on January 12, 2012 at 12:54 am: “…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.”
Alas, Mike, fracking and sometimes frakking are obviously the vernaclar terms for fracturing, which is the word we should be using in formal communications. The casual or diminutive versions of scientific or technical words are usually established by the media and the public, rarely by the specialists, and they tend to be spelled the way they sound. To spell it as fracing would be confusing, as most people only read the word, rarely hear it, and so would pronounce it as “frayssing.” English is a crazy, but living language without formal academies dictating use or spelling and we sometimes have no choice but to accept the will of the mob. Resistance is futile, I’m afraid.
frac’ing. The apostrophe denotes missing letters.
Since each unit step in magnitude denotes a thirty times increase in energy released, there is no way you could release the energy of a magnitude 8.0 with a multitude of 0.1s over space or time. That has always been the fly in this ointment. Besides, if one mistakenly produces a magnitude 5.5 in a populated area with poorly consolidated soils, who picks up the tab for the damage?
I seem to recall that they did lead to some tightening of building codes–specifically in the Western Federal Savings Building. Do you know about this?
Hydro-fracturing is nothing even remotely new. In these parts probably 60+% of drinking water wells are hydrofractured to increase output. That percentage goes up with capacity. Against ‘fracking’? Tell it to the town water utility.
What is new is the somewhat coarse sounding ‘fracking’ that is the new boogey man for a lot of special interests. Cheap and plentiful domestic oil and natural gas is the last thing that they want, so the development of the various shale formations finding so much recoverable domestic energy is catastrophic.
Demonizing ‘fracking’ at every turn is their best weapon at the moment. To be able to associate earthquakes with ‘fracking’ would be positively epic in trying to oppose energy development projects.
We can probably look forward to tidbits like “Fracking, known to cause earthquakes..” in helpful little news buddy insights on energy stories in the media as well as in the sound bite world of message boards and special interest group efforts to stop projects.
The problem in that in the green worldview reality doesn’t matter. Facts on fracking just don’t matter. I expect the list of problems caused by fracking to compete with the list for CAGW. There’s a Venn diagram project if someone is interested.
[snip language – f-word – policy violation ~mod]
My comment is awating moderation?! Freedom of speach! >:-(