[Dallas News] By 2023, oil production from West Texas’s Permian Basin is expected to double, surpassing the production of every OPEC nation except Saudi Arabia, according to at least one estimate. Since Texas earthquake rates first picked up in 2008, academic scientists, regulators and oil and gas companies have publicly agreed on one thing: fracking was not to blame. Instead, studies tied the quakes to the disposal of wastewater from oil and gas production.However -
Now, a new study suggests for the first time that some Texas earthquakes ‐ specifically, those in West Texas ‐ may indeed be connected to hydraulic fracturing. "However, it’s not the only cause," said a research scientist at the University of Texas at Austin’s Bureau of Economic Geology.UT-Austin, in the heart of the blue island in central Texas.
Earthquake rates near Pecos, a city of 10,000, soared from about two per year in 2008 to more than 1,400 in 2017, according to another new study led by researchers at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics. The vast majority have been too small to feel, and several residents reached by phone in the Pecos area said they had never felt one.
While the earthquakes in West Texas have been small ‐ the largest near Pecos registered 3.7-magnitude, just intense enough to feel, but not strong enough to cause damage ‐ they could grow larger as production accelerates, researchers said. To reduce the risk of larger earthquakes, operators should "be mindful of their rates of injection," said a seismologist at Ohio’s Miami University who studies human-induced quakes.
All things in moderation, as they say.
To help reduce the risk of earthquake damage, some companies have deployed their own seismic stations and implemented monitoring systems that quickly alert operators when small quakes take place.
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Scientists say they believe that fracking poses less of an earthquake hazard than wastewater injection. The largest earthquake tied to fracking in the United States has been in the 3-to-4 magnitude range, said Brudzinski, while the largest earthquake tied to wastewater disposal was a 5.8-magnitude quake that struck Pawnee, Okla., in 2016, causing significant damage to buildings.
Residents in the Pecos area reached by phone and Twitter on Thursday said they were not troubled by the quakes. A former middle school teacher from Pecos said he was initially concerned by the quakes but felt better once scientists came and set up monitoring stations. "Most people felt at ease after the researchers came in," he wrote in a Twitter direct message. "Over time, economic development continued and the town is getting so much better that it's not that big of a concern."
Except to Progressives.