U.S. Government Confirms Link Between Earthquakes and Hydraulic Fracturing

Written by John Daly

Tuesday, 08 November 2011 oilprice.com On 5 November an earthquake measuring 5.6 rattled Oklahoma and was felt as far away as Illinois. Until two years ago Oklahoma typically had about 50 earthquakes a year, but in 2010, 1,047 quakes shook the state. Why? In Lincoln County, where most of this past weekend's seismic incidents were centered, there are 181 injection wells, according to Matt Skinner, an official from the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the agency which oversees oil and gas production in the state. Cause and effect? The practice of injecting water into deep rock formations causes earthquakes, both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Geological Survey have concluded. The U.S. natural gas industry pumps a mixture of water and assorted chemicals deep underground to shatter sediment layers containing natural gas, a process called hydraulic fracturing, known more informally as “fracking.” While environmental groups have primarily focused on fracking’s capacity to pollute underground water, a more ominous byproduct emerges from U.S. government studies – that forcing fluids under high pressure deep underground produces increased regional seismic activity. As the U.S. natural gas industry mounts an unprecedented and expensive advertising campaign to convince the public that such practices are environmentally benign, U.S. government agencies have determined otherwise. According to the U.S. Army’s Rocky Mountain Arsenal website, the RMA drilled a deep well for disposing of the site’s liquid waste after the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency “concluded that this procedure is effective and protective of the environment.” According to the RMA, “The Rocky Mountain Arsenal deep injection well was constructed in 1961, and was drilled to a depth of 12,045 feet” and 165 million gallons of Basin F liquid waste, consisting of “very salty water that includes some metals, chlorides, wastewater and toxic organics” was injected into the well during 1962-1966. Continue reading... Note the phrase, “Once the link between the fluid injection and the earlier series of earthquakes was established.”

Marcellus Shale Estimates Slashed by 80 Percent

Maybe natural gas isn't as bountiful as some like to think.

The United States Geological Survey this week issued a report stating that the Marcellus Shale formation contains 84 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered, but technically recoverable natural gas and 3.4 billion barrels of technically recoverable natural gas liquids.

That's well up from the 2 trillion cubic feet estimate issued by the USGS in 2002 for the geological formation that straddles Pennsylvania and New York. The increase is due to advances in hydraulic fracking. However, it is far lower than the estimate of 410 trillion cubic feet that the Energy Information Administration has been recently using. As a result, the EIA said it would reduce its estimates by over 80 percent to match the USGS forecast.

The report will likely give natural gas skeptics ammunition in the debate over the role that gas can and should play in the energy strategy of the U.S. Proponents portray gas as the fuel of the future. Hydraulic fracking has opened up a large number of new fields and caused the price to plummet from $7 for a million BTUs to just over $4.

An MIT report issued earlier this year noted that the U.S. will likely become a net importer of gas by 2030.


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Past earthquakes in southern Colorado studied for links to gas fracking, water disposal

Colorado Independant
By David O. Williams | 08.24.11


Monday’s 5.3-magnitude earthquake southwest of Trinidad in southern Colorado is being called rare but “consistent with the region and historic activity in the area,” and so far no official connection is being made to gas drilling — or hydraulic fracturing — of relatively shallow coal-bed methane gas reserves in the area.

But such a connection to so-called “fracking” and the disposal of fracking fluid in the local gas fields has been investigated by the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) in the past. A September 2001 swarm of earthquakes prompted a USGS investigation.

“In recent years, a large volume of excess water that is produced in conjunction with coal-bed methane gas production has been returned to the subsurface in fluid disposal wells in the area of the earthquake swarm,” the USGS report reads. “Because of the proximity of these disposal wells to the earthquakes, local residents and officials are concerned that the fluid disposal might have triggered the earthquakes.

“We have evaluated the characteristics of the seismicity using criteria proposed by Davis and Frohlich (1993) as diagnostic of seismicity induced by fluid injection. We conclude that the characteristics of the seismicity and the fluid disposal process do not constitute strong evidence that the seismicity is induced by the fluid disposal, though they do not rule out this possibility.”

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