Science Magazine Talks Drilling And Earthquakes

• Scott Detrow
  BioRecent Stories

  

  Scott Detrow is a congressional correspondent for NPR. He also co-hosts the NPR Politics Podcast.
  
  Detrow joined NPR in 2015 to cover the presidential election. He focused on the Republican side of the 2016 race, spending time on the campaign trail with Donald Trump, and also reported on the election's technology and data angles.
  
  Detrow worked as a statehouse reporter for member stations WITF in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and KQED in San Francisco, California. He has also covered energy policy for NPR's StateImpact project, where his reports on Pennsylvania's hydraulic fracturing boom won a DuPont-Columbia and national Edward R. Murrow Award in 2013.

Are earthquakes tied to natural gas drilling? As StateImpact Pennsylvania has reported over the past few months, experts are leaning toward an answer of “yes.”
It’s not hydraulic fracturing that’s causing quakes, but rather the deep injection wells that store drilling waste water thousands of feet underground.A Youngstown, Ohio injection well likely caused a dozen tremors last year, culminating in a 4.0 earthquake December 31.
On Friday, our friends at StateImpact Texas posted a Science Magazine live chat about the link between injection wells and earthquakes. The conversation addresses issues like whether fracking itself has caused quakes, whether these smaller tremors are helping prevent a larger quake, and how scientist can examine whether a site is prone to earthquakes:

Among the things that we would like to know are the ambient stress and fluid pressure conditions. Regulators currently require some of this information so that injection of water won’t accidentally create a hydrofrac. We would also like to know more about the actual geologic conditions in the injection interval, particularly regarding the transport properties of the fluid through the rock formations. Another important consideration would be the presence of hydraulically conductive fractures or faults that might permit the pressure to be transmitted to great distance, potentially destabilizing faults in the basement. Some of these faults could be recognized by seismic imaging methods.

 

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