Meet The Man Responsible For Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic
As part of the US shale miracle, a far less pleasant, and talked about side-effect are the millions of gallons of wastewater: that key component of the new drilling technology that allows previously inaccessible deposits to be extracted. And, as increasingly more states are finding out, the problem isn’t pumping the water out, but finding a place to put it, no places more so than Oklahoma.
To be sure, Oklahoma benefited hugely from the shale revolution: the state’s oil production has doubled in the past five years. And now, as the Piper has finally come to collect his due, the ground is literally shaking under the feet of Oklahoma’s residents as the aftermath of the fracking “boom” has unleashed an unprecedented series of earthquakes.
The reason: instead of disposing wastewater in some regulated manner, in Oklahoma it gets injected back underground. And as wastewater disposal rates have doubled, seismic activity has exploded across Oklahoma. After averaging 1.6 earthquakes per year of magnitude 3.0 or higher, the state experienced 64 in 2011, including its largest in recorded history—a 5.7-magnitude temblor on Nov. 6, 2011, centered in Prague, 50 miles east of Oklahoma City, that buckled a highway, destroyed 14 homes, and injured two people.
Last year, Bloomberg reports, the number soared to 585 quakes, making Oklahoma the most seismically active state in the continental U.S.; it’s on pace for 900 quakes in 2015 a number one would expect from a place such as Japan, located on a continental fault line or even California (whose San Andreas faultline is about to make another B-grade movie appearance) and certainly not in America’s heartland. Swarms of quakes have rattled other states with oil and gas operations, including Arkansas, Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Ohio, and Texas.
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