Doesn't the arrival of man-made earthquakes signify the departure of even larger natural earthquakes? This would oddly strike me as possibly a valid use of fracking technology -- forcing earthquakes before tension builds to catastrophic levels.
(If so, I'd prefer we did this without pulling up more petroleum products.)
Disclaimer: I skimmed the article. Also, I'm against a future built on petroleum and fracking in general.
Unfortunately, while small earthquakes can relieve stress, the amount of energy they displace is inconsequential in terms of the most destructive earthquakes.
You would need 1 million magnitude-3 earthquakes to release the equivalent amount of energy from a single magnitude-7 quake. You'd need 33 million magnitude-3s to release the equivalent energy from a magnitude-8, etc.
Keep in mind that the bigger earthquakes are caused by wastewater injection, not fracking.
> Many of the larger earthquakes are caused by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground. (Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.)
Wastewater injection is usually a result of oil and gas drilling, but it's not the same thing as fracking.
I would think most of these earthquakes are the vertical-movement variety, whereas tectonic sliding horizontal movement earthquakes are the much larger and dangerous kind, and may not be affected by any release of tension like these man made ones may be creating.
I think it's similar to the reasoning for "We aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with the Tesla Model 3" and "We aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with new vegan egg replacements" — we just don't have any good reason to believe it will happen.
Because "Why not?" is not a reason to believe something. Cars also cause the ground to shake. So do sledgehammers. Not everything that sometimes causes the ground to shake will cause the Yellowstone Caldera to erupt.
Fracking is associated with relatively small earthquakes. But relatively small earthquakes happen in the area of Yellowstone all the time, so that doesn't necessarily seem alarming.
The thing is, this isn't, as you requested, "reasoning suggesting that we aren't going to trigger the Yellowstone Supervolcano with fraking". But it's also not "just being sarcastic". What I'm pointing out is that we have no logical reason to believe we are going to make Yellowstone explode with fracking. Until there is evidence that something will cause Yellowstone to erupt, it's kind of weird to be asked to argue positively that it won't.
WTF is with the abrupt money talk in the middle of the article? The author just can't resist the urge to bash on the evil oil men? This really spoiled the article for me.
The references to money buying political influence are both brief and relevant. I don't see how you could write a credible article on this topic without observing the existence of powerful economic incentives.
(Edit: I originally wrote 'credible argument' which doesn't make much sense)
The oil business is interesting to economists because the real world market comes quite close to the economic model of perfect competition; it's fast and cheap to set up or shut down a well (relative to the value of the oil one may extract), the commodity is standardized and fungible, there are enough producers in the market that they exist as price-takers, and the price of oil is widely known and tracked throughout the economy - far better then any other single commodity. Why wouldn't you consider the economic factors in a story like this?
Well, the article could be simply about the physics of geology or it could add some context.
One important thing about this is indemnification. Since these quakes are induced by industry and some quakes cause superficial (on the earth's surface) damage, the question of who pays for damage to structures arises. Whose drilling caused it? Since it probably can't accurately be pinpointed, it's more likely there be some kind of industrywide insurance scheme which would cover these incidents.
Because the money is the important thing. These earthquakes are a product of oil production, and they have a negative impact on people in those communities. Oil production makes a small number of people very rich, and those people use that money to buy political influence, which means that the state continues to allow them to do something that has strong negative externalities, and doesn't force them to appropriately compensate those who are affected.
Oklahoma is a seismically active region that has always had a lot of earthquakes in the magnitude 5 range. USGS even has dedicated seismic hazard maps for Oklahoma. This has been going on long before anyone was fracking in Oklahoma.
Most Americans are unaware that Oklahoma is an active seismic zone and articles like this prey on that ignorance by implying that these earthquakes arrived with fracking. There is a lot of fracking in places do not naturally have a lot of earthquakes but the fact that they always pick Oklahoma suggests that they are trying to construct a false correlation.
A lot of fracking occurs in California too but most people understand that earthquakes in California are going to happen whether you frack or not. Same with Oklahoma.
Like cancer, once can show that something causes an increased rate of earthquakes (on top of an underlying base rate) even if no individual earthquake can be definitively attributed to that cause.
> A team of USGS scientists led by Bill Ellsworth analyzed changes in the rate of earthquake occurrence using large USGS databases of earthquakes recorded since 1970. The increase in seismicity has been found to coincide with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells in several locations, including Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Ohio. Much of this wastewater is a byproduct of oil and gas production and is routinely disposed of by injection into wells specifically designed and approved for this purpose.
> Hydraulic fracturing, commonly known as “fracking,” does not appear to be linked to the increased rate of magnitude 3 and larger earthquakes.
showing only one earthquake of >= M5 in Oklahoma in the last 70 years (an M5.5 in 1952). That is, excluding the ramp-up since 2008 and in particular the Prague, OK M5.6 (2011).
This sparse historical record of M5 earthquakes is also supported by the linked graph from USGS (http://earthquake.usgs.gov/research/induced/) that shows about 20 events/year of M3 or larger in the entire central-eastern US (pre-2009 -- the rate increases after 2005-2009).
The simple version of the Gutenberg-Richter relation predicts 10x fewer earthquakes for each unit jump in M. So, very roughly, that would imply 0.2 earthquakes per year of M5 or above across the central-eastern US, a region much larger than Oklahoma. The actual rate observed in the 20th century appears significantly lower than this.
One of the key differences between Oklahoma & California earthquakes
is the relative depth of quakes of significant magnitude.
Quakes caused by tectonic plate interaction and
those possibly caused by fluid injection may
not be usefully comparable - but ask a seismologist,
or at least a geologist, not a journalist, or a
random internet commenter.
edit: Pasting a long (512+ chars) URL did not work well,
but use the settings sprocket and the checkboxes
for US Faults & Hazards.
BTW, the hot spot in the Missouri/Arkansas area is the
"New Madrid" fault, locally pronounced with the stress on the first syllable: "Mad-rid" not "Mu-drid".
It makes emergency preparedness folks nervous because
it had a big quake in the early 1800s, very little since,
and now has lot of brick construction - sigh.
(If so, I'd prefer we did this without pulling up more petroleum products.)
Disclaimer: I skimmed the article. Also, I'm against a future built on petroleum and fracking in general.