La Terra Trema

I can remember a time when, if you raised the possibility that fracking might cause earthquakes, the natural gas industry treated you as if you were a nutcase. But now it's official. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) has confirmed that a series of a dozen earthquakes in the Youngstown, OH area, includinging a December 31 earthquake on that measured 4.0 on the Richter scale, were caused by the underground injection of fracking wastewater at the Northstar 1 disposal well. So if you felt the earth move on New Year's Eve, you weren't drunk, you had just been fracked.

While wastewater had been presumed to have caused earthquakes in Arkansas, Oklahoma and Great Britain, the evidence in this case is much stronger. After the first few quakes, ODNR hired seismologists from Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory to investigate. When seismographs were placed in the area, the geologists determined that the epicenters of subsequent quakes were within .8 kilometers of the injection site at the same depth (3 km), and were caused by slippage along a previously unmapped fault.

Operations at the well have been stopped, and ODNR has issued new rules in Ohio. They have banned injections below 8,000 feet. They will require pressure and volume monitoring, and automatic shutoff systems. Finally, they will require electronic tracking of wastewater entering from outside the state. Presumably, there will be no attempt to fine D&L Energy, the owner of the well. Nevertheless, a D&L released a statement disputing the findings, claiming that ODNR opted for “a politically expedient preliminary report that sacrifices true understanding for haste.”

Defenders of fracking were quick to point out that wastewater injection is not the same as fracking, the process by which natural gas is extracted, which also involves underground injection of fluids at high pressure. They said that fracking takes less time than injection of wastewater. Is time the critical variable? Other possibilities would seem to include the volume of fluids deposited in the ground, the depth of the drilling, and the pressure required to do it.

Although disposal of wastewater is only one of many public health problems associated with fracking, it is one of the most serious. There are approximately 144,000 gas wells in the U. S. producing 2 billion gallons of wastewater every day. Wastewater consists not only of fracking fluid, which contains known carcinogens and toxins, but also material brought up to the surface from the shale, including radioactive heavy metals.

There are three options for disposing of wastewater. (1) What they call “recycling” involves diluting it with fresh water and reusing it for subsequent fracking. However, eventually toxins accumulate and it can no longer be reused. (2) At this point, it could be sent to water treatment plants, but most existing plants are inadequate to treat these toxins. Wastewater sent to Western Pennsylvania treatment plants produced measurable increases in bromides, which are linked to cancer and birth defects, in the Monongahela River. (3) That leaves underground injection.

These earthquakes occurred in part because there was an “unmapped”—that is, unknown—fault in the area. What percentage of faults are known? That's unknown. (Duh.) Researchers say the only way to prevent future earthquakes is to do a seismic survey of the area prior to constructing the wastewater facility. Such a survey would cost $10 million per well. I'm sure the industry will be happy to oblige.

Pennsylvania, unlike Ohio, does not even monitor wastewater disposal facilities, but relies on the Environmental Protection Agency to handle permits for these facilities. An EPA spokesman, Jon Capacasa, said this could not have happened on their watch because they require companies seeking permits “to identify known faults . . within a mile of a proposed well site.” (Italics mine.) But of course this fault was unknown. I guess he didn't read the report.