Fracking Earthquakes Shake Canada

Susan Phillips

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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.

September 7, 2012 | 1:17 PM

More reports of drilling related earthquakes have surfaced, this time from our northern neighbor Canada. In past reports, deep injection wells, used to dispose of fracking waste water were the cause. But this time, it’s the fracking itself. Energy Wire reports on a study that links quakes in British Columbia to fracking operations near faults in the Horn River Basin.

The tremors, which shook the basin between 2009 and 2011, caused no damage or injuries, but the probe by the B.C. Oil and Gas Commission into the incidents is sure to draw attention from opponents of fracturing, the process of injecting water, sand and chemicals into shale rock fractures to release trapped oil and gas.

The quakes were minor, between 2.2 and 3.8 on the richter scale, and were the first reported tremors in the area. Fracking operations in Britain last year, also caused small quakes.