Take millions of gallons of natural gas hydro-fracking waste water then pour it down a hole dug thousands of feet down into the bedrock and what do you get? Well, according to the U.S. Department of Energy and other experts, you may get a whole lotta shakin going on. But right now, no regulations are on the books that force the oil and gas industry to take that into consideration when they dig their fracking waste wells—yet.
The risk of earthquakes put the kabosh on operations at a fracking waste-water injection well suspected of triggering a 4.0 trembler near Youngstown, OH, on New Year's Eve. This month, the state is expected to release a report to determine whether there are adequate regulations to address how these injection wells are sited and operated.
Watch NRDC geologist Briana Mordick talk about the earthquake risk in this video:
Earthquakes linked to injection wells have been documented in numerous states, including Texas, Arkansas and even others in Ohio. Here's an excerpt from Briana's recent blog:
A similar swarm of earthquakes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area, where the Barnett Shale is being developed, was linked to produced water disposal wells. The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission shut down a disposal well and enacted a permanent moratorium on future disposal wells in an approximately 1,200 square-mile area in the Fayetteville Shale after injection caused hundreds of earthquakes. In fact, this is not even the first time an injection well has caused earthquakes in Ohio: a series of earthquakes in Ashtabula, Ohio in 1987, 2001, and 2003 were caused by a disposal well.[1]
At the site near Youngstown, hydro-fracking wastes—called flowback water as well as produced water that comes to the surface with the oil or gas-—are imported from other states and injected deep underground, burying a toxic stream that includes carcinogens and low-level radioactive wastes. Local residents are becoming increasingly worried about industry’s “out of sight, out of mind” philosophy, and they are joining forces to pressure lawmakers to increase safety regulations of the exploding number of fracking operations in their area. Here’s what WYTV in Youngstown reported last week:
Columbiana County resident Karen Bertolasio fears what oil and natural gas drilling may soon do to her community. She lives next to Beaver Creek State Park. "A lot of my neighbors are already talking about signing up," said Bertolasio. "There's nothing I would rather see happen in our state than for us to pick up and become very prosperous again, but not because people are going to be unsafe."
Some Ohio politicians are fed up with the state's eagerness to import these kinds of wastes. “We have become in Ohio the dumping ground for contaminated brine,” state Representative Armond Budish, the House Democratic leader, said at a Jan. 26 forum in Columbus. “We didn’t prepare adequately for the potential for earthquakes and other environmental problems,” Bloomberg reported last week.
Experts are taking a closer look at industry practices that some say have gotten ahead of adequate safety precautions. Until the fracking industry is forced to study earthquake dangers more closely, some worry there will be more rockin' and rollin' near these wells as they proliferate across the country, pouring more chemical-laced liquid wastes underground.
Follow Rocky Kistner on Twitter: www.twitter.com/rockyatnrdc
Jeff Biggers: If We Can Stop the Keystone Pipeline, We Can Stop Mountaintop Removal. Right?
Michael Brune: The Sierra Club and Natural Gas
Below the plant,the situation must be improving,because there was a finite amount of fuel and it decays/breaks down with time.The question is ,how quickly it is improving. One would need to know how old the fuel rods were at the time of the accident. (ANd,even if they were 'spent' there's quite a lot of radiation.The half life of a nuclear fission is a pretty simple natural log calculation,but I don't know the fissionable materiel.
Now, I'm on call and have a bad migraine patient to see.Hope this helps
The oil & gas corporations effectively rule public policy, so hydraulic fracturing will continue. The trade-offs between needed energy resources and environmental damages, despite what any industry spokesperson may insist, are ambiguous and unknown despite obvious problems seen in many areas where this method of energy extraction has occurred. The problem, of course, is that once environmental damages result, they will likely be irreversible and serious. Groundwater, as example, is 30 times more prevalent than surface water. Groundwater pollution will be disastrous.
This has absolutely nothing to do with hydraulic fracturing.
"Hydraulic fracturing methods do produce quakes, as has been amply documentedÂ."
Please provide links to said documentation?
You oil & gas apologists have already won, so stop fighting the facts of your depredations, and maybe begin preparing for the coming law suits.
Could you provide a link where these statements of his are quoted? I'd like to see exactly what he said - thanks!
Here ya go:
http://www.mtexpress.com/index2.php?ID=2005140652
Here's the comment: "But Hawk said the regulation would be pointless as there is no chance of the company's wells contaminating groundwater in southwestern Idaho."
http://payette.govoffice.com/vertical/Sites/%7B44867065-4476-41DD-91A9-F7FF564B033D%7D/uploads/10-24-11_Work_Session.pdf
Here's the comment: "David Hawk stated that wells that were fracked they haven't seen a problem in other states"
On December 14th there were two Town Hall meetings held in Weiser and Payette. I physically attended both meetings and have audio and video recordings of both. Mr. Hawk made the same statement at the Weiser meeting, that "there are no documented problems from natural gas drilling".
In addition, at the third Senate Resources committee hearing this past Wednesday, Mr. Hawk repeated this ludicrous claim. I was not physically present in the room, but was listening to the live audio stream. I did however have three friends who WERE there in the room when he made this statement.
In fact, it was so egregious that Senator Werk (a geologist) actually called him out on it!
Hope this helps!
Alma
Carefully chosen disposal wells should be fine to use, and unless there is a huge fault through the injected area, there should be a modest upper limit to the size of an earthquake that can result - hence the 4.0 in OH, which apparently took place in an area that was rather more faulted than ideal for this purpose.
Thanks Guys! Love the new texture in my walls! You rock!
Have you tried to get the guys to buy you some new walls?
So we shouldn't effectively "throw the baby with the bathwater" by banning fracking outright. Taking a non-level-headed approach would effectively make us no better than the global warming deniers and the coal / oil / chamber of commerce / wall street journal / faux news / business-as-usual / dittoheads we criticize for being ignorant in the first place.
As President Obama says all the above.
But earthquakes can be controlled by regulating water temperature and pressure, depending on the geology they're drilling into. There are also theories that once you release the "potential energy" in the ground, the tremors will become smaller and smaller.
We shouldn't throw the baby out with the bathwater. Banning fracking means we ban enhanced geothermal too, which is one of the most promising, non-intermittent, universally-applicable renewable technologies there is. And we aren't going to replace traditional sources with intermittent renewables, which don't line up exactly with demand peaks, unless we have clean and sustainable storage (not here yet) or backup "peaker" natural gas plants.
We need to have a level-headed approach to this, or we're no better than the climate deniers or right-wing nitwits we constantly criticize.
Do you have an example of this? NOT the one in "Gasland" because when that was investigated by actual environmental scientists of the Colorado Dept. of Natural Resources and NOT a theater kid from New York City, it was determined that it was biogenic gas not associated with oil & gas development. Probably from the FOUR coal beds the water well penetrated at shallow depths.
" And then there are those pesky earthquakeÂs that begin happpening when fracking is introducedÂ."
This, too is incorrect, as the seismic activity doesn't coincide with hydraulic fracturing and hydraulic fracturing was never thought by anyone to be causal. In fact the wells being investigated as possibly related were never hydraulically fractured at all! They're not even gas wells! They're wastewater disposal wells, which are used throughout the world for dozens of other purposes in addition to frac flowback disposal. Obviously, there's not much cause for alarm, as if a high pressure injection well is inadvertantly drilled into a fault zone (often previously unknown) and is causing problems, you simply plug that well and move to a different location.
Furthermore this frac flowback disposal problem is about to be solved by treating frac flowback to distilled-water purity and re-using it. As this technology, and waterless hydraulic fracturing, spread in the oil field the issue of disposal well related fault slippage becomes irrelevant.
Additionally, many of the "toxic elements" you mention occur deep within the formations drilled through. Get your facts straight before you scream "Fire!" in the movie theater!!
Natural gas can be used for "peaker" plants, ramped up and down quickly, and back up renewables when the sun isn't shining or wind isn't blowing. Until we have cheap and sustainable storage technologies, or pull geothermal and tidal out of their "redheaded stepchild" status, this is pretty much our only option. Either that or keep up business-as-usual with the coal and nuke plants. We have to transition to something.
Yes, that is correct.
Pennsylvania State Study Shows Hydraulic Fracturing Does Not Harm Aquifers or Water Supplies
http://www.cst.net/geoscience/oil-business/123-new-pa-study-shows-fracking-doesnt-damage-aquifers
When people in my family had damage to their homes, the state didn't fix it, the drillers didn't fix it. The home owners fixed it and on their own dime. That adds up, And when that happens to families on fixed incomes, it quickly becomes a hardship.
Make companies disclose their chemicals, and then regulate / ban if they don't comply. This is a no-brainer. But we shouldn't just outright ban it, without thinking about the consequences.
Maybe mother Earth shouldn't dress so provocatively!
OOOHHH Baby, shake that mountain range!
Sounds a little too good to be true, if you ask me....
Regards,
Nawar
Solar and wind can do the same energy job without despoiling America.