Pump jacks and wells are seen in an oil field on the Monterey Shale formation where gas and oil extraction using hydraulic fracturing near McKittrick, Calif. Concerns include the possibility of earthquakes triggered by the fracking process which injects water, sand and various chemicals under high pressure into the ground to break the rock to release oil and gas for extraction. (David Mcnew/Getty Images)
New earthquake hazard maps show that fracking’s byproducts are clearly to blame for recent swarms of earthquakes plaguing several states.
The maps highlight 17 hot spots where communities face a significantly increased risk of earthquakes, and the accompanying report links the earthquakes to injection wells used to dispose of fracking wastewater. Previous maps did not include earthquakes that are induced by human activities.
“We consider induced seismicity to be primarily triggered by the disposal of wastewater into deep wells,” said Mark Petersen, chief of the National Seismic Hazard Project for the U.S. Geological Survey, which released the maps last week.
[2014 study links fracking wastewater and Okla. earthquakes]
The earthquake hot spots include portions of Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, Ohio, Arkansas, Alabama, Colorado and New Mexico. Until recently, many of these states were some of the places in the United States least likely to have an earthquake. But then high oil prices brought in companies eager to exploit ancient seabeds where oil and gas mingle with brine.
Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, extracts far more water from these underground oil-laden rocks than traditional drilling. Currently there is no way to treat, store and release the billions of gallons of wastewater at the surface. Instead, drillers pump the fluid back underground, below groundwater, into wells where it sometimes triggers earthquakes.
For instance, in Oklahoma, state records show that companies injected more than 1.1 billion barrels of wastewater into the ground in 2013, the most recent year for which data is available. The following year, Oklahoma had more magnitude-3 earthquakes than California did. The quakes clustered around wastewater injection wells.
Oklahoma’s current earthquake rate is now 600 times higher than its pre-fracking rate, which was based on the state’s natural seismicity, the state geological survey said.
[Okla. worries over swarm of earthquakes and connection to oil industry]
“We suspect the vast majority of these earthquakes are from produced wastewater,” said Austin Holland, head seismologist for the Oklahoma Geological Survey.
Fracking itself can also induce earthquakes, but the technique has never caused earthquakes greater than magnitude 4. For comparison, an Oklahoma injection well is thought to have triggered a magnitude-5.6 earthquake in 2011. Mining blasts and geothermal energy plants can also trigger earthquakes.
Until now, the USGS has usually excluded induced earthquakes from its earthquake hazard maps. The researchers who make the maps assume earthquake rates are more or less the same through time, and that’s not the case with man-made quakes.
“These earthquakes are different from natural earthquakes because they turn on and off over short periods of time, sometimes over a period of a year,” Petersen said.
So even as north central Oklahoma and Texas were suffering swarms of earthquakes, the 2014 hazard map showed little to no shaking risk for these states. The national map shows where earthquakes may strike in the next 50 years, how big they might be and how strong the shaking could get.
But now there is no way for scientists to ignore the incredible rise in earthquakes in the central United States. With input from more than 150 scientists, the USGS decided to release a separate earthquake hazard map for man-made earthquakes. Researchers gauged a region’s shaking risk by first looking for changing earthquake rates. Then the scientists counted the previous year’s temblors to forecast the next year’s tally.
A one-year model is not useful for issuing building permits, but it is helpful for planning where to spend limited funds on bridge repairs and for other decisions, said Bill Ellsworth, a USGS seismologist who is studying injection-well earthquakes.
A simplified version of the man-made earthquake hazard map will be published by the end of the year and will be updated yearly thereafter, Ellsworth said. (The agency will continue to issue the long-term forecasts every six years.) Scientists are still fine-tuning models that predict the shaking strength from man-made earthquakes, which tend to be shallower than natural quakes.
Researchers involved in the mapping project called for expanded seismic networks and public access to well-injection records last week at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America. Only a few injection wells cause headaches, so this data may help determine whether small earthquakes at wells could lead to more-damaging ones.
“This monitoring would fundamentally change how often and how accurately we can update these maps,” said Andy Michael, a USGS geophysicist in Menlo Park, Calif,, who was involved in the project.