Recent Fracking News
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 10:48AM Monday, January 9, 2012 at 10:42AM
Reuters) - With mounting evidence linking hundreds of small earthquakes from Oklahoma to Ohio to the energy industry's growing use of fracking technology, scientists say there is one way to minimize risks of even minor temblors.
Only, it costs about $10 million a pop.
A thorough seismic survey to assess tracts of rock below where oil and gas drilling fluid is disposed of could help detect quake prone areas.
But that would be far more costly than the traditional method of drilling a bore hole, which takes a limited sample of a rock formation but gives no hint of faults lines or plates.
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 10:06AM CLEVELAND (AP) — A northeast Ohio well used to dispose of wastewater from oil and gas drillingalmost certainly caused a series of 11 minor quakes in the Youngstown area since last spring, a seismologist investigating the quakes said Monday.
Research is continuing on the now-shuttered injection well at Youngstown and seismic activity, but it might take a year for the wastewater-related rumblings in the earth to dissipate, said John Armbruster of Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory in Palisades, N.Y.
Monday, January 9, 2012 at 9:58AM Two small earthquakes that shook the Lancashire coast of northwest England and the nearby city of Blackpool earlier this year were probably caused by hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—a shale gas extraction technique that was being used nearby to explore its shale gas wells—according to a report released today. The energy company Cuadrilla Resources had begun an experimental drilling operation half a kilometer from the quakes' epicenter in March.
Fracking has caused concerns in some countries over its potential health and environmental impact—critics accuse it of contaminating drinking water with gas and the chemicals used for extraction—and it is banned in some countries and some U.S. states. Cuadrilla's is the first fracking operation conducted in the United Kingdom.
After geologists pointed the finger at Cuadrilla as the possible cause of the quakes, it commissioned independent experts to prepare a report on the topic. Entitled Geomechanical Study of Bowland Shale Seismicity, it has concluded that it is "highly probable" that the quakes were triggered by Cuadrilla's fracking: high pressure injection of fluids into rocks in order to fracture them and release shale gas. But the quakes were a fluke, the report continues, as the geology of the region was highly unusual to begin with.
