Drill, Baby, Drill = Earthquakes?

1:25 pm EST June 14th, 2009 | Uncategorized | 7 Comments

Hmmmmmmm.

The earth moved here on June 2. It was the first recorded earthquake in this Texas town’s 140-year history — but not the last. There have been four small earthquakes since, none with a magnitude greater than 2.8. The most recent ones came Tuesday night, just as the City Council was meeting in an emergency session to discuss what to do about the ground moving.

The council’s solution was to hire a geology consultant to try to answer the question on everyone’s mind: Is natural gas drilling — which began in earnest here in 2001 and has brought great prosperity to Cleburne and other towns across North Texas — causing the quakes?

‘I think John Q. Public thinks there is a correlation with drilling,’ Mayor Ted Reynolds said. ‘We haven’t had a quake in recorded history, and all the sudden you drill and there are earthquakes.’

At issue is a drilling practice called ‘fracking,’ in which water is injected into the ground at high pressure to fracture the layers of shale and release natural gas trapped in the rock.

There is no consensus among scientists about whether the practice is contributing to the quakes. But such seismic activity was once rare in Texas and seems to be increasing lately, lending support to the theory that drilling is having a destabilizing effect.

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7 Responses to “Drill, Baby, Drill = Earthquakes?”

  1. MatanteDodo says:
    June 14, 2009 at 1:48 pm

    It must be God shaking the Earth over godless Obama’s election! Graaaaawr! (angry god roar)

  2. Eric Sipple says:
    June 14, 2009 at 2:07 pm

    ANd really, what else would you expect from a process called fracking?

  3. Repack Rider says:
    June 14, 2009 at 2:20 pm

    Human activity can spawn earthquakes. The effect on earthquake frequency and severity of building dams and adding the weight of huge amounts of water is called reservoir–induced seismicity. Changing the density of formations deep underground and then lubricating them with the injection of water is not likely to REDUCE the possibility of earthquakes.

  4. James H says:
    June 15, 2009 at 5:43 am

    “Fracking” just reminds me of certain plotlines on Battlestar Galactica. And those involved drilling, too.

  5. Duros62 says:
    June 15, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    Stranger things have happened.

    This happened because of the same process.

  6. Luke The Intrepid says:
    June 16, 2009 at 4:38 pm

    It seems to me that “drill baby drill” was for oil not natural gas. Most oil seems far less resource intensive to extract. We need a good mix of energy and an effecient means to transport it to where it needs to go. The longterm issue is what do we do when oil and natural gas production peaks and begins to run out. We need a broad mix of energy supplies to replace them. Solar photovoltaic electricity can probably produce most of the shortfall but only on a very wide scale and only if there is no climate event which effects the density of cloud cover or the amount of light reaching us from the sun.

    Nuclear power and renewable power types can do some of the job but not all. Coal production has probably already peak for the US and we are trying to get away from using it as it much more dirty than burning oil or natural gas. That and the supply of coal is finite and easily mined sources will run out in the next half century or so.

  7. Thad says:
    June 18, 2009 at 9:29 pm

    “‘I think John Q. Public thinks there is a correlation with drilling,’ Mayor Ted Reynolds said. ‘We haven’t had a quake in recorded history, and all the sudden you drill and there are earthquakes.’”

    Um, yes, that’s what a correlation IS. It’s not a question of what people THINK; that is the definition of the damn word.

    The question is whether or not it’s CAUSAL.