{"id":19349,"date":"2016-03-31T14:37:16","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T19:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19349"},"modified":"2016-03-31T14:37:16","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T19:37:16","slug":"study-fracking-not-just-fracking-wastewater-injection-causing-earthquakes-in-western-canada","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19349","title":{"rendered":"Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada"},"content":{"rendered":"

Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada\u00a0<\/a><\/h3>\n
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A groundbreaking study published today in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link, for the first time, between\u00a0hydraulic fracturing (\u201cfracking\u201d)<\/a>\u00a0for oil and gas and earthquakes.<\/p>\n

Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin<\/a>\u201d confirms the horizontal drilling technique (which in essence creates an underground mini-earthquake to open up fissures for oil and gas extraction) is responsible for earthquakes, above and beyond what is already canonized in the scientific literature. We already knew that injecting fracking waste into underground wells\u00a0can cause quakes<\/a>. But now it’s not just the\u00a0injections wells<\/a>, but the fracking procedure itself that can be linked to seismicity.<\/p>\n

The study focuses on an area in Canada known as the\u00a0Western Canada Sedimentary Basin (WCSB)<\/a>, one of Canada’s biggest shale basins and tight oil and gas producing regions.<\/p>\n

The researchers \u201ccompared the relationship of 12,289 fracking wells and 1,236 wastewater disposal wells to magnitude 3 or larger earthquakes in an area of 454,000 square kilometers near the border between Alberta and British Columbia, between 1985 and 2015,\u201d explained a press release. They \u201cfound 39 hydraulic fracturing wells (0.3% of the total of fracking wells studied), and 17 wastewater disposal wells (1% of the disposal wells studied) that could be linked to earthquakes of magnitude 3 or larger.\u201d<\/p>\n

If that sounds like a fairly small percentage, Atkinson and colleagues readily admit that is the case in the study. Yet they also write that it could portend worse things to come as more and more wells are fracked in the region.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is important to acknowledge that associated seismicity occurs for only a small proportion of hydraulic fracturing operations,\u201d they wrote,\u00a0proceeding to cite another paper<\/a>\u00a0written in 2015 by lead author\u00a0Gail Atkinson<\/a>\u00a0\u2014 a professor of earth sciences at the University of Western Ontario \u2014 and colleagues on the impacts of induced seismicity.<\/p>\n

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Study: Fracking, Not Just Fracking Wastewater Injection, Causing Earthquakes in Western Canada\u00a0 A groundbreaking study published today in Seismological Research Letters has demonstrated a link, for the first time, between\u00a0hydraulic fracturing (\u201cfracking\u201d)\u00a0for oil and gas and earthquakes. Hydraulic Fracturing and Seismicity in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin\u201d confirms the horizontal drilling technique (which in essence […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[103,5317,331,412,11481,13194],"class_list":["post-19349","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-canada","tag-desmog-blog","tag-fracking","tag-hydraulic-fracturing","tag-steve-horn","tag-wastewater-injections"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19349","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19349"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19349\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19350,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19349\/revisions\/19350"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19349"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19349"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19349"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}