{"id":40747,"date":"2018-11-20T08:55:10","date_gmt":"2018-11-20T13:55:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40747"},"modified":"2018-11-20T08:55:10","modified_gmt":"2018-11-20T13:55:10","slug":"pick-your-poison-the-fracking-industrys-wastewater-injection-well-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=40747","title":{"rendered":"Pick Your Poison: The Fracking Industry’s Wastewater Injection Well Problem"},"content":{"rendered":"

Pick Your Poison: The Fracking Industry’s Wastewater Injection Well Problem<\/a><\/h3>\n
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\"Oklahoma<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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The first known oil well in Oklahoma happened by accident. It was 1859 and\u00a0Lewis Ross was actually drilling for saltwater<\/a>(brine),\u00a0not oil. Brine was highly valued at the time for the salt that could be used to preserve meat. As Ross drilled deeper for brine, he hit oil. And people have been drilling for oil in Oklahoma ever\u00a0since.<\/p>\n

Lewis Ross might find today’s drilling landscape in the Sooner State somewhat ironic. The oil and gas industry, which has\u00a0surging\u00a0production due to horizontal drilling and fracking,\u00a0is pumping out huge volumes of oil but even more\u00a0brine.\u00a0So much brine, in fact, that the fracking industry needs a way to dispose of the brine, or\u00a0\u201cproduced water,\u201d that comes out of oil and gas wells\u00a0because it isn’t suitable for curing meats. In addition to salts, these wastewaters can contain naturally occurring radioactive elements and heavy metals<\/a>.<\/p>\n

But\u00a0the\u00a0industry’s\u00a0preferred approaches\u00a0for disposing of fracking wastewater\u00a0\u2014 pumping it underground in either deep or shallow injection wells for long-term storage \u2014 both come with serious risks for nearby\u00a0communities.<\/p>\n

In Oklahoma, drillers\u00a0primarily use\u00a0deep injection wells for storing their wastewater from fracked shale wells, and while the state was producing the same amount of oil in 1985 as\u00a0in 2015<\/a>, something else has changed. The rise of the fracking industry in the central U.S.<\/span> has coincided with a rise in\u00a0earthquake\u00a0activity.<\/p>\n

From 1975 to 2008, Oklahoma\u00a0averaged from one to three earthquakes of magnitude 3 or greater a\u00a0year. But by\u00a02014,\u00a0the state averaged 1.6 of these earthquakes a day<\/i>.\u00a0<\/a>It now has\u00a0a website<\/a> that tracks them in real\u00a0time.<\/p>\n

\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pick Your Poison: The Fracking Industry’s Wastewater Injection Well Problem The first known oil well in Oklahoma happened by accident. It was 1859 and\u00a0Lewis Ross was actually drilling for saltwater(brine),\u00a0not oil. Brine was highly valued at the time for the salt that could be used to preserve meat. As Ross drilled deeper for brine, he […]<\/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":[23122,5317,222,331,1214,23121,412,11782,2826,3794],"class_list":["post-40747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-environment","tag-deep-injection-wells","tag-desmog-blog","tag-earthquakes","tag-fracking","tag-fracking-wastewater","tag-heavy-metals","tag-hydraulic-fracturing","tag-justin-mikulka","tag-oklahoma","tag-radioactive-waste"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40747","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=40747"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40747\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":40748,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/40747\/revisions\/40748"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=40747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=40747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=40747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}