Texas restricts hydraulic fracturing because it causes so many earthquakes

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The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC) has suspended new permits for sewage injection from fracking in a patch of the state after a wave of earthquakes was linked to the practice.

In a statement to fossil fuel producers published Friday, the state’s oil and gas regulator said it will no longer allow wells to be removed around Midland, in the northwest region of Texas, due to earthquakes until further notice. The agency required 76 existing wells to reduce daily injection volumes and ordered that wells not yet in service be allowed to refrain from starting injections. The announcement came on the same day that a 3.3-magnitude earthquake struck 36 miles north, E&E News reported Monday.

“The most important mission of the Texas Railroad Commission is to protect public safety and the environment,” Andrew Keys, a spokesperson for the agency, told Motherboard. “The seismologist and staff at RRC have investigated recent earthquakes near populated areas near Midland and Odessa, and evaluated steps that oil and gas operators can take to help mitigate the events.”

Wastewater injection is a common practice to dispose of the brine that is produced in the fracking process. It involves releasing polluted liquid deep underground into containment zones in porous geological formations, where it is meant to remain indefinitely. This water typically includes a mixture of chemicals used in the fracking process, which are at risk of leaching into nearby waterways, polluting groundwater and ecosystems.

This practice is common in the Permian Basin of Texas, the largest oil field in the country (an estimated five trillion liters were disposed of in the area between 1978 and 2016). It is also well understood that it causes seismic activity. When fluid with such high pressure is injected at great depth (sometimes miles) into the Earth, it risks crashing into the fault line, counteracting the friction that exists between the tectonic plates and triggering an earthquake. In Oklahoma, home to oil and gas drilling, the government’s Geological Survey linked a 900-fold increase in earthquakes between 2008 and 2019 to wastewater injection, a pattern state seismologist Jake Walter told Scientific American “unprecedented in human history.”

Known to some as “rock earthquakes,” seismic disturbances are a common result of sewage injections that have worried residents near the state’s oil production areas for more than a decade.

In 2009 and 2010, researchers at Southern Methodist University linked a series of earthquakes in Claiborne, Texas, to injecting cracked sewage underground after installing sensors near fault lines and locating injection wells near the epicenter of a number of earthquakes. The same authors reported the same trend around the seismic wave a few years later, between 2013 and 2014, in Azle, Texas, 50 miles north.

This practice, and the resulting earthquakes, disturbed the nearby residents for a long time.

“They haven’t had earthquakes here in 100 years, and for this to happen now — just 32 in the past two months — it’s crazy,” Darla Hobbs, a resident of Azle, Texas, told NBC News about the earthquake series. In her hometown in 2014. “It is not our fault that we live here. It is the industry of gas wells for drilling, fracking and injection wells.”

Recently in March of 2020, a 5.0-magnitude earthquake in West Texas, near the New Mexico border, was linked to nearby sewage injection. It was located in an area with “known human-caused earthquakes,” the US Geological Survey reported at the time, and was the largest event recorded in the area in two decades, spanning 5.3 miles and unleashing more than 1,000 residents’ reports, despite its existence. . Location in a sparsely populated area.

The months since have seen six more earthquakes, including on Friday, hit the region around Midland and Odessa. In its launch to operators, the RRC said wastewater injection was “likely to contribute” to this activity.

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