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Minor earthquakes in the Dallas area (as well as east Texas in general) haven't "just started." They have been going on long before any "fracking" activities. I'm not saying that fracking absolutely has not caused any earthquakes anywhere ever but minor earthquakes in northeast Texas are nothing new and predate any fracking activities.
The interesting thing about this particular group of minor earthquakes in Irving is both the number (up over 20 now) and that the epicenter on all of them is the same.
Fraking AKA Underground fracturing is used to increase the flow capacity of oil and gas formations. It does this by injecting high pressure water through wells into the formations. The water forces the rocks to crack and the sand contained in the fluid holds the cracks apart when the pressure is released. The gas or oil can then flow to the production wells. Fracking significantly increases the volume of the formation and the rocks redistribute the pressures by slipping in the form of small earthquakes. Weather this small earthquakes can redistribute the stresses in a manner that would require a large earthquake depends on the extent of the fraking and the local to regional geologic formations.
Anyone interested in Mid continent earthquakes should look up the New Madrid Fault quake in the early 1800's. This was a very significant. it was not caused by any of man's activities.
(Yet another) Great post.
There is a lot of research yet to do here.
The New Madrid quake hit when St. Louis was not much more than an "outpost" of a few thousand people and is largely forgotten to most in the US.
It caused the Mississippi to flow north for a day or two.
Huffpo (the "green" section no less) .....fair and balanced.....
Quote:
A state investigation of five small tremors last month in the Youngstown area, in the Appalachian foothills, found the injection of sand and water that accompanies hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, in the Utica Shale may have increased pressure on a small, unknown fault, said State Oil & Gas Chief Rick Simmers. He called the link "probable."
While earlier studies had linked earthquakes in the same region to deep-injection wells used for disposal of fracking wastewater, this marks the first time tremors in the region have been tied directly to fracking, Simmers said. The five seismic events in March couldn't be easily felt by people.
The oil and gas drilling boom targets widely different rock formations around the nation, so the Ohio findings may not have much relevance to other areas
This is how you muddy an honest debate. You take what the scientists say in one study as "probable".....change it to "certain".....and then ignore the caveats about how it may not be relevant to other parts of the country.
This kind of garbage is as bad as the people that claim fracking could never cause any problems whatsoever.
I highly recommend Daniel Yergin's 'The Quest' to anyone who is interested not only in fracking, but in the economic and environmental issues that come with all parts of the energy sector.
Let's set the bar in the right place: producing enough energy to not only feed the demands of a developed, first-world country, but also lift hundreds of millions if not billions out of poverty elsewhere in the world, is going to have a cost. The notion that we can drill miles into the Earth with gigantic machinery and have zero consequences just sounds absurd.
So it's a good thing that energy companies employ some of the best engineers in the world to minimize that cost rather than listening to people whose identity is wrapped up in an idealogical crusade, which is of course still their right, but who would benefit from doing the math on the impact of inexpensive (or even any) energy in poor countries where it was not previously available.
That aside, this is a legitimately difficult problem for us normal folks to get our heads around. Let's take stock of what we know:
- Earthquakes have always happened and will always happened, but we do have a general idea of how often and how large they are; we have less of an idea of why we'd have larger or more frequent earthquakes in one decade over another, so we're stuck guessing at correlation
- With and without earthquakes, foundations shift and pools crack, especially during Texas draughts. This doesn't eliminate fracking or earthquakes as a potential source from a logical point of view, but if you consider the details of how shale gas fracking works (most of what is happening in Texas) you can make an educated guess as to the likelihood of correlation. See Ryan's Quora answers below.
- While we should all be critical of the energy sector's claims about, well, anything, 'being critical' here means analyzing the details of what they're doing and how they're doing it, and testing their claims as often as we can. It is just as important to be critical of the other camp. No one can tell you that you aren't an environmentalist, and discussions between the energy sector and environmentalists usually involve signs and shouting rather than a reasoned discussion. We owe the environmentalist movement a lot, but we also have them to thank for derailing the best available solution to greenhouse gasses and deaths in the coal industry each year - that being nuclear power (again, check out The Quest - this case is made at great length there).
If you really want to understand this stuff as a layman, you have to get in to some fairly boring history and science about how and why fracking came about -- for instance, it's been going on for thirty years; only shale gas fracking is new. You also have to treat with caution anecdotes (true anecdotes) about the lady in Central Pennsylvania with a fracking well a mile away who found methane coming out of her sink, because if you've ever been to Central Pennsylvania (and I have) then you know that the regular, water-wells -- you know, the ones connected to your sink -- are falling apart because they're a hundred years old or more and had problems like this well before fracking showed up. Our awareness of the giant energy company down the street makes us look for problems like this, as we should. But ain't none of us testing our sinks for methane that don't have a fracking company down the road, and methane comes from a lot of places.
Why not? Because there's no need to create a fracture where one already exists!
Please tell me that you do understand fracking causes existing cracks to widen, thus causing earthquakes.
If you don't understand and accept this fact, then you're rolling on the floor and laughing because you're clueless.
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