What's Quaking Beneath Ohio's Shale?

• Susan Phillips
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Susan Phillips tells stories about the consequences of political decisions on people's every day lives. She has worked as a reporter for WHYY since 2004. Susan's coverage of the 2008 Presidential election resulted in a story on the front page of the New York Times. In 2010 she traveled to Haiti to cover the earthquake. That same year she produced an award-winning series on Pennsylvania's natural gas rush called "The Shale Game." She received a 2013 Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Journalism Award for her work covering natural gas drilling in Pennsylvania. She has also won several Edward R. Murrow awards for her work with StateImpact. In 2013/14 she spent a year at MIT as a Knight Science Journalism Fellow. She has also been a Metcalf Fellow, an MBL Logan Science Journalism Fellow and reported from Marrakech on the 2016 climate talks as an International Reporting Project Fellow. A graduate of Columbia School of Journalism, she earned her Bachelor's degree in International Relations from George Washington University.

Just after 3 0’clock on Saturday afternoon, as residents of Youngstown, Ohio were preparing for their New Year’s revelry, they got a shock. A 4.0 magnitude earthquake shook the town. It was the largest quake in the area since 1986. The first northeastern Ohio earthquake was recorded in 1823, long before fracking came to town.
Youngstown is known more for its shuttered industry than its seismological activity. But on Monday, geologists studying a series of recent earthquakes in the area say they’re almost certain deep injection wells caused the temblors. Deep injection wells are used to dispose of fracking wastewater. So fracking did not directly cause the earthquakes, but the deep injections are a part of the gas drilling process. The well thought to be the culprit was forced to stop taking frack fluid, even before Saturday’s quake.
The Huffington Post reported on Monday that researchers from the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y. say that doesn’t mean the quakes will stop right away.

“Thousands of gallons of brine were injected daily into the Youngstown well that opened in 2010 until its owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, agreed Friday to stop injecting the waste into the earth as a precaution while authorities assessed any potential links to the quakes.
After the latest and largest quake Saturday at 4.0 magnitude, state officials announced their beliefs that injecting wastewater near a fault line had created enough pressure to cause seismic activity. They said four inactive wells within a five-mile radius of the Youngstown well would remain closed. But they also stressed that injection wells are different from drilling wells that employ fracking.”

Nearly half of all waste getting sent down Ohio’s deep wells today comes from Pennsylvania’s Marcellus Shale production.
Deep injection wells are also called brine disposal wells, or class II underground injection wells. They can take any fluid related to oil and gas drilling.  In Pennsylvania the wells are regulated by the Environmental Protection Agency. The EPA took over the task of permits, inspections and enforcement from state regulators in 1985. Currently there are only eight permitted injection wells in Pennsylvania. Two newly permitted wells in Warren County have not yet begun to take frack water. Ohio, however, has more than 180 deep injection wells.
The oil and gas industry uses injection wells to dispose of waste water, which has a high salt content, as well as chemicals and heavy metals. Water can also be treated at private treatment facilities. The process cleans most of the water, but at least some smaller amount of fluid still needs to be injected back into the ground.
No fracking is permitted with deep well injections. The wells are cased, and the waste water is sent thousands of feet below the surface, usually to a sandstone, or limestone formation.
A new study presented at the meeting of the American Geophysical Union in December, found a positive relationship between the amount of fluid injected into a well, and the size of a potential earthquake.
The link between fracking and earthquakes became a huge buzz on the internet this summer when a 5.8 earthquake struck Mineral, Virginia in August. East Coasters aren’t used to earthquakes, certainly not that large, so many speculated there was a connection. Industry spokespeople said “no fracking way” did drilling cause the Virginia quake.
Jim Coleman, a geologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told StateImpact at the time that injecting fluid under high pressure does cause measurable seismic activity. But he says the earthquakes are typically too small to be noticed and didn’t think there was any evidence that fracking would have caused the Virginia quake.
Some studies looking at the earthquake connection to fracking are ongoing. In November, Cuadrilla Resources Inc., concluded that their fracking operations in Blackpool, England likely caused small earthquakes. Scientists with the British Geological Survey are studying the link between the small earthquakes, which registered at 2.3 and 1.5 magnitude, and fracking.
In September, Arkansas regulators banned the use of deep injection wells to store wastewater after they found the activity caused a rise in small earthquakes last winter. The Arkansas Geological Survey told the AP last July that seismic activity decreased dramatically once the wells were shut down. The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission has not banned fracking, only the use of wells to dispose of wastewater.
More than 40 years ago, a study conducted by the U.S. Geological Survey attributed a 5.3 magnitude earthquake in 1967 to a large injection well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal in Denver, Colorado. Several smaller earthquakes followed the larger one.
A more recent study by Southern Methodist University and the University of Texas also linked a rash of small earthquakes in the Dallas-Fort Worth area in 2008 and 2009 to deep injection wells used to dispose of natural gas wastewater. But as the study’s authors pointed out, many similar wells operated in areas where no seismic activity occurred.
The Army Corps of Engineers has expressed concern about drilling for natural gas near dams and has a national team studying the potential impact. The Corps has requested a 3000 foot buffer around dams because it worries that fracking near fault lines could cause earthquakes or shifts in sediment that would weaken dam structures. CBS 11 News in Dallas reports that the Corp’s Fort Worth district wrote a letter in September to town officials in Grand Prairie, Texas warning them that a nearby Chesapeake Energy gas well site could potentially cause a “catastrophic dam failure.”

Editor's Picks