Texas suspends new permits for fracking after multiple earthquakes

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New permits for fracking in Texas have been suspended after the drilling technology was linked to a recent wave of earthquakes.

The Texas Railroad Commission (RRC), which oversees the state’s oil and gas industry, issued a notice last week about brine disposal wells, where cracked sewage is injected underground. The order is valid until further notice in the Midland Basin region.

Since February 2020, six earthquakes of magnitude 3.5 or greater have occurred in the West Texas region. These included the M-3.7 earthquake in Martin County on September 7, 2021, and the M-3.6 earthquakes northeast of Odessa in February 2020 and May 2021, the commission noted.

The center said its analysis found that fracking wastewater injection wells “likely contribute to seismic activity.”

Besides the lack of new permits, 76 wells have been ordered to reduce their maximum daily injection rate to 10,000 barrels.

Wells that had permits, but were not in use, were asked to refrain from injecting fluids. The CTC said it expects the requests to last at least a year.

The Independent has contacted the Regional Research Center for comment.

Fracking – hydraulic fracturing, officially – is the process of recovering gas and oil from shale rock. Well operators drill vertically or horizontally at most new US sites, then force a high-pressure mixture of sand, water, and chemicals against the rock formations. The large volume of fluid breaks down, or fractures, layers of rock to release gas and oil deposits.

The Permian Basin in West Texas is the most productive oil patch in America and has experienced a fracking boom in the past decade. But the practice has raised a number of environmental and health concerns, including an increased potential for so-called “rock earthquakes”.

When large volumes of water are pumped underground, it increases the risk of colliding with fault lines or exacerbating movement along tectonic plates.

A 2020 study suggests that fracturing processes that go deeper into the ground can increase the likelihood of an earthquake by nearly 10 times. The report, published in the Bulletin of the American Seismological Society (BSSA), was based on data from more than 1,300 individual well sites across Oklahoma.

The study found that in a single rocky layer, the likelihood that fracturing would cause seismic activity increased from 5 to 50 percent with increasingly deeper well operations, from 0.9 to 3.4 miles (1.5 to 5.5 kilometers).

And while some of the fracking water is recycled, the drilling method still requires millions of gallons, a particular problem in Texas where the climate crisis is adding to extreme temperatures and drought conditions.

A 2015 study found that in the Permian Basin, fracking uses between 264,000 and 2.6 million gallons of water at a time, according to Scientific American. There is also a risk of groundwater contamination from the chemicals used in injection solutions.

Methane, the primary component of natural gas, is 25 times more effective at trapping heat in the atmosphere than carbon dioxide. A 2015 study gave a conservative estimate that the Barnett Shale in Texas released 544,000 tons of methane annually — the equivalent of 46 million tons of carbon dioxide.

Seth Gladstone, of the Food & Water Watch NGO that has advocated for a ban on hydraulic fracturing, told The Independent last year that fracking has “several inherent risks”.

But earthquakes are among the most immediate and potentially catastrophic risks. Nobody wants earthquakes under their feet or under their homes. And no one who experienced any of the devastating effects of fracking would choose to live near them.

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