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Meet The Man Responsible For Oklahoma’s Earthquake Epidemic
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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Environmentalists Are Taking California To Court Over Illegal Oil Industry Wastewater Injection
Environmentalists Are Taking California To Court Over Illegal Oil Industry Wastewater Injection
Environmentalists filed a motion requesting a preliminary injunction today in a California court to immediately stop the daily illegal injection of millions of gallons of oil field wastewater into protected groundwater aquifers in the state.
Last week, Earthjustice filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Sierra Club and the Center for Biological Diversity in Alameda County Superior Court that challenges California regulators’ emergency rules meant to rein in the state’s disastrous Underground Injection Control (UIC) program.
Officials with the state’s Division of Oil, Gas, and Geothermal Resources (DOGGR) have admitted that their agencyimproperly permitted more than 2,500 wells to pump oil industry wastewater and fluids from enhanced oil recovery techniques like acidization and steam flooding into groundwater aquifers that should be protected under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act.
Instead of shutting down the offending wells, however, DOGGR issued emergency rules last February that would allow many of them to continue operating until 2017, according to the complaint filed by Earthjustice, which seeks to have the new rules thrown out and the wells operating in protected aquifers shut down while new regulations are being developed.
“Both the emergency regulations and the status quo fail to protect California’s underground drinking water sources from harm,” the complaint states. “Since DOGGR continues to fail in implementing its regulatory duties, this Court must vacate the emergency regulations and ensure that DOGGR complies with the law by ordering DOGGR to take all immediate action necessary and available to it to meet its obligations to prohibit illegal injection of wastewater into protected aquifers.”
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