Bootleg Fire in Oregon is too large and hot to contain

From an Article by Sarah Kaplan, Washington Post, July 1, 2021

Heat waves have toppled temperature records across the nation, and firefighters are actively battling 48 large blazes that have consumed more than half a million acres in 12 states. But land management agencies are carrying out fire mitigation measures at a fraction of the pace required, and the funds needed to make communities more resilient are one-seventh of what the government has supplied.

“We’re burning up, we’re choking up, we aren’t just heating up,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) told President Biden at a meeting with Cabinet officials and Western governors Wednesday. “Across the board we have to disabuse ourselves of the old timelines and the old frames of engagement. … We can’t just double down.”

Yet fire experts say the escalation of wildfires, fueled by climate change, demands an equally dramatic transformation in the nation’s response — from revamping the federal firefighting workforce to the management of public lands to the siting and construction of homes.

“As our seasons are getting worse and worse … it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point,” said Kelly Martin, a wildfire veteran and president of the advocacy group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters. “We need a new approach.”

The West’s hot, dry start to summer has already been devastating, to people as well as trees.

On Thursday, authorities across the Pacific Northwest and western Canada said they were investigating at least 500 suspected deaths from heat illness that occurred amid the week’s record-shattering temperatures.

Thousands of residents had to be rapidly evacuated from the sprawling Lava Fire, south of the Oregon-California border, when extreme heat and strong winds caused the blaze to explode.

Many people are still missing after a fast-moving wildfire overwhelmed the tiny mountain village of Lytton, British Columbia, on Wednesday — just a day after it notched Canada’s highest-ever temperature of 121 degrees Fahrenheit.

“This is becoming a regular cycle, and we know it’s getting worse,” Biden said Wednesday. “In fact, the threat of Western wildfires this year is as severe as it’s ever been.”

‘Always doing more with less’

When Martin started her career with the U.S. Forest Service more than three decades ago, the agency had a “warlike” approach to handling wildfires. Crews used bulldozers and other equipment to cut through vegetation and create barriers that could contain an approaching front. Helicopters and big air tankers dropped retardant from high above the flames. Although land managers knew fire was an important part of most Western ecosystems, they were also under pressure to stop blazes before they reached the area’s growing population centers.

“And we were very successful at it,” Martin said. To this day, more than 95 percent of fires are suppressed before they reach communities.

But by the time Martin retired as chief of fire and aviation at Yosemite National Park last year, climate change had fundamentally altered the nature of wildfire, making the blazes that did escape containment increasingly costly and dangerous to fight.

In most forest types, the proportion of fires that are “high severity” (killing the majority of vegetation) has at least doubled in recent decades. Firefighters are seeing more and more “extreme fire behavior” — whirling “fire tornadoes,” crown fires that spew embers into the wind and blazes that move so fast and burn so hot they create their own weather.

In 2018, a veteran Redding, Calif., firefighter was killed when a vortex the size of several football fields swept down upon him as he evacuated residents ahead of the catastrophic Carr Fire.

“Watching what the current wildland firefighters are faced with, last year and this year, it is exponentially greater in terms of risk and trauma,” Martin said.

The U.S. government is the nation’s biggest employer of what are known as “wildland” firefighters. Most are temporary workers, their salaries as low as $13.45 per hour for a starting forestry technician. They spend summers traveling the country, working 16-hour days, 12 days at a time, often relying on overtime and hazard pay to make ends meet.

For decades, they’ve relied on a months-long offseason to rest and recover.

But now there is no offseason; one fire year simply bleeds into the next, as winter rain and snow is delayed and diminished by climate change. About 100 families had to be evacuated from the Santa Cruz mountains in January — usually California’s wettest month — when winds re-ignited the embers of a fire that started last August.

Drilling, fracking and wastewater injection create underground disturbances

From an Article by Andrew Nikiforuk, The Tyee News Service, May 26, 2021

This new warning comes from a former senior scientist with the BC province’s oil and gas commission.

Since 2005, British Columbia’s experiment with hydraulic fracturing of gas wells has changed the geology of the province’s northeast. It is now home to some of the world’s largest fracking-induced earthquakes outside of China. In 2018, one magnitude 4.6 tremor tied to fracking even rattled buildings in Fort St. John and stopped construction on the Site C dam. It was followed by two strong aftershocks.

Now, a comprehensive new scientific study warns that stress changes caused by the technology could trigger a magnitude 5 earthquake or greater in the region, resulting in significant damage to dams, bridges, pipelines and cities if major regulatory and policy reforms aren’t made soon.

Allan Chapman, the author of the paper, served as a senior geoscientist for the BC Oil and Gas Commission and as its first hydrologist from 2010 to 2017. Prior to working for the commission, he directed the Ministry of Environment’s River Forecast Centre, which forecast floods and droughts.

Chapman, now an independent geoscientist, told The Tyee that he felt compelled to write the paper because researchers have concluded that fracking “induced earthquakes don’t have an upper limit” in terms of magnitude. In addition, “there is a clear and present public safety and infrastructure risk that remains unaddressed by the regulator and the B.C. government.”

The BC Oil and Gas Commission rejected Chapman’s conclusions in a statement to The Tyee, saying his study contained “speculation.”

Recent events in China’s Sichuan province prove that fracking can trigger large and destructive earthquakes. Gas drilling operations there generated shallow earthquakes between magnitude 5.3 to 5.7 in recent years that resulted in deaths, extensive property damage and angry protests by local citizens.

Chapman says the commission’s current system for managing tremors, known as a “traffic light protocol,” can’t prevent larger magnitude earthquakes because it ignores how cumulative fracking over time destabilizes shale formations with high pressures and increases seismic risk. “To protect people and infrastructure, we are going to have to avoid fracking in some areas,” he told The Tyee.

Public infrastructure placed at risk by fracking now includes “the communities of Dawson Creek, Fort St. John, Taylor, Hudson’s Hope, Upper Halfway (Halfway River First Nation) and possibly others, and infrastructure such as the WAC Bennett, Peace Canyon and Site C dams, community water supply and treatment systems, the Taylor Gas Plant, the Taylor Bridge crossing of the Peace River, numerous earthen water storage dams, and others,” said the paper.

The Taylor Bridge, for example, was built in 1960 prior to the fracking boom, which has changed both seismic patterns and risks in the region. The bridge, now deteriorating, is responsible for transporting millions of dollars of merchandise, food and fuel every hour between Fort St. John and Dawson Creek in the province’s Peace Region.

More fracking, more tremors

Given that 60 to 70 per cent of earthquakes greater than magnitude 3 are already caused by hydraulic fracturing in the giant Montney shale formation that straddles B.C.’s border with Alberta, Chapman forecasts more and larger tremors in the future.

One factor, he says, is accelerated drilling to serve Shell’s LNG Canada project in Kitimat, B.C. Another factor he cites is that the injecting of fracking fluid deep into the ground appears to have a cumulative effect.

Chapman’s study documents how fracking-induced earthquakes “increase in both frequency and magnitude in relation to frack fluid injection volumes, and that there appears to be a cumulative development effect where prior frack fluid injection possibly resets the seismic potential in certain tectonic environments to allow for eased earthquake initiation related to future lower-volume injections.”

As a consequence, writes Chapman, “the future in the Montney is not if earthquakes greater in magnitude than 5 will occur, but when, with that occurrence possibly without any precursor warning.”

Chapman’s study, published in the Journal of Geoscience and Environmental Protection this week, also sheds a light on companies triggering the earthquakes as well as the inadequacy of current mitigation measures and legislation.

Hydraulic fracturing blasts large volumes of pressurized water, sand and chemicals deep into concrete-like shale formations one to two kilometres in the Earth. That force shatters rock underground with a network of fractures so that methane, oil or natural gas liquids can be released. It can also connect to natural faults triggering swarms of earthquakes.

‘Speculation’ says oil and gas commission

In a statement to The Tyee, the BC Oil and Gas Commission outright rejected Chapman’s analysis. “Our geological and engineering experts have concluded it is based on a number of unproven assumptions or incomplete consideration of the factors cited.”

The commission added that the paper didn’t look at Montney’s structural setting, fault types and local rock stress. It added: “Speculation such as is in this paper requires expertise in seismology, fracturing, reservoir engineering, ground motion and critical infrastructure. All of the commission’s research and changes to regulatory framework are vetted through partner organizations that retain full-time, trained seismologists.”

The commission did not specifically answer questions from The Tyee on the adequacy of the traffic light protocol in the Montney. The commission is entirely funded by industry.

Unlike most papers on fracking and earthquakes, Chapman’s study is one of the first to name companies responsible for large tremors in northeastern B.C. The scientist said he did so for reasons of accountability. “It is in the public interest for their names to be known.”

Since 2012, 77 per cent of the earthquakes triggered by fracking in the Montney have been caused by three companies: Petronas, Tourmaline Oil and Ovintiv (formerly Encana).

Petronas, a Malaysian company, holds the record for most quakes. Its fracking activities are associated with 78 per cent of the earthquakes in the northern Montney and almost one-half the earthquakes in the entire Montney over the 2013 to 2019 period.

Researchers estimate that one out of 150 wells fracked wells in Western Canada will trigger a magnitude 3 tremor. But Chapman found that that 1.7 per cent of fracked wells (about one out of 60 wells) in B.C. are associated with earthquakes with magnitudes of 3 and up. That’s nearly double the rate of earlier research.

The Montney shale formation, which contains both methane and liquid condensates, sits under a vast area of timber, farmland and wilderness on 26,600 square kilometres of Treaty 8 land extending from south of the community of Dawson Creek to 200 kilometres northwest of the community of Fort St. John.

Between 2012 and 2019, nearly a dozen companies have fracked 2,865 wells with 39 million cubic metres of water in the Montney. The volume of pressurized water used per well has increased steadily in recent years from an average of 7,077 cubic metres per well in 2012 to 22,054 cubic metres per well in 2019.

Many operators including Ovintiv, Petronas and CNRL have fracked wells using more than 30,000 cubic metres per well. ConocoPhillips stands out for using 83,000 cubic metres per well for 13 wells in 2019.

Beginning in 2008, industry started to trigger “felt” earthquakes greater than magnitude 3, raising concerns throughout the region. B.C. and Alberta regulators initially denied the industry could cause earthquakes that significant and then called them “anomalous” or minimized their shaking motions to a truck driving by.

As industry injected more volumes of water into the ground to fracture gas-bearing rock, the frequency of earthquakes jumped from an average of 1.6 magnitude 3 quakes a year to almost 6.9 magnitude 3 tremors by 2019. Petronas led with the highest earthquake rate: “39 per cent of its fracked wells are associated with earthquakes,” followed by Tourmaline Oil with 29 per cent and Ovintiv at nine per cent.

Part 2 — To appear tomorrow ….

Injection wells operated at high pressure are an accident waiting to happen

Announcement from Ryan Clover, Halt the Harm Network, March 8, 2021

Are you concerned about injection wells? Want to meet other people working to prevent them?

Not sure if you’ve seen this yet – but FracTracker put together a report about disposal wells in PA and Matt Kelso will join us this Friday at our weekly live event.

Matt is the Manager of Data and Technology at FracTracker, so I’m sure we’ll have lots to discuss. I look forward to seeing what comments or questions you bring to the conversation on Friday.

§§§. MARCH 12, 2021 @ 2 PM
Coffee Break with FracTracker Alliance –
Pennsylvania’s Waste Disposal Wells –
A Tale of Two Datasets

Coffee Break is a weekly live-stream discussion to talk about the latest with researchers, leaders, community organizers, filmmakers, and artists standing up to fracking and the oil & gas industry.

This week’s guest is Matt Kelso, Manager of Data and Technology at FracTracker Alliance. Stop by to meet Matt and learn about the work they’re doing to map the industry.

​Register here via Crowdcast​.

Thanks! — Ryan Clover,
Halt the Harm Network

Pennyroyal Opera House in Fairview (Ohio), area of concern for two injection wells

Please support the Concerned Ohio River Residents (CORR) by taking this action on two proposed injection wells for Belmont County, OH TODAY. With the proposed petrochemical hub in Appalachia, we believe more and more injection wells are being planned to prepare for the waste that would be generated to feed the build-out. We also believe that by stopping the cracker plant, there will be less of a need for injection wells. Read on to see how you can help CORR today.

Tri-State Environmental SWIW LLC is applying for two injection well permits at a single location in section #2 of Kirkwood Township on Dickinson Cattle Co. land near Barnesville, Ohio. The permit application states that the average injection at this site would be 8,000 barrels a day of oil and gas waste.

We have the opportunity to submit comments in opposition to this dangerous facility through March 14th. We urge folks to do so and to try to recruit others to take action as well. We would suggest also sending your letters of opposition to the company. Calling Ohio Dept. Of Natural Resources (ODNR) to voice your concerns, as well as submitting written comments, is encouraged.

***Please request for a public hearing in your letter or if you call. If there are enough requests, the ODNR may hold a hearing on the injection wells.***

Injection wells not only threaten our water supplies, they can also be a significant source of air pollution. Below is a link to Earthworks FLIR images of the Silcor injection well in Cambridge, Ohio that shows evidence of significant air pollution. If these injection wells are permitted, brine truck traffic will increase drastically in and around Barnesville, Fairview and surrounding areas. Injection wells have also been proven to cause earthquakes.

Efforts to stop these injection wells are encouraged and greatly appreciated. We must remain resistant and persistent to all that threatens us and our children’s future.

Thank you, Concerned Ohio River Residents
(740) 738-3024

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Send written comments postmarked by March 14th to:

Ohio Department of Natural resources, Resources Management
2045 Morse Road, Building F-2, Columbus, Ohio 43229-6693
(614) 265-6922

And to the company at:

Tri-State Environmental SWIW LLC
40200 Cadiz Piedmont Road, Cadiz, Ohio 43907

FLIR images of Hillstone Silcor Injection Well: https://youtu.be/_sKZoQTcPio

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See also: Company seeking permits for two injection wells in Kirkwood Township, Shelley Hanson, Martins Ferry Times Leader, March 1, 2020

FAIRVIEW — Tri-State Environmental of Cadiz has applied for permits to install two different brine injection wells off Fairview Road in Kirkwood Township, Belmont County. Fairview is home to the Pennyroyal Opera House.

According to a public notice, Tri-State has applied for permits with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to drill two wells to inject brine water associated with the production of oil and natural gas. The first well would be called Tri-State #1, in Section 31, Kirkwood Township.

“The proposed well will inject into the Ohio Shale at a depth of 4,600 to 4,800 feet. The average injection is estimated to be 4,000 barrels per day,” according to the notice. “The maximum injection pressure is estimated to be 1,060 psi.”

The second well would be called Tri-State #2, in Section 25, Kirkwood Township. “The proposed well will inject into the Bass Islands through Salina Group at a depth of 5,200 to 5,500 feet,” the notice states.

The No. 2 well also would receive an estimated 4,000 barrels of brine per day. This would equate to about 168,000 gallons per day.

For more information, contact ODNR at 614-265-6922. Comments and objections must be received by ODNR no later than 15 days after Feb. 28 via mail to:

Ohio DNR Division of Oil & Gas Resources Management, 2045 Morse Road, Building F-2, Columbus, OH 43229. Comments can also be emailed to: oilandgas@dnr.state.oh.us.

Deep well drilling penetrates many geologic layers

From an Article by Renee Cho, Earth Institute, Columbia University, January 28, 2020

Environmental impacts are very serious problems

Methane leaks, vents and flares

Natural gas is mostly methane, a greenhouse gas that, over 20 years, traps more than 84 times more heat in the atmosphere than does carbon dioxide. A 2019 MIT study found that between 1.5 and 4.9 percent of the natural gas that is produced and distributed leaks before it is used. Methane leaks can occur anywhere from the well to the storage facility and throughout the distribution system to the end user. In addition, methane “leaks” when it is intentionally vented or flared. According to the World Bank, flaring in the US increased 48 percent from 2017 to 2018.

A 2018 study found that US oil and gas operations emit 60 percent more methane than was estimated by the Environmental Protection Agency. Another estimated that North America’s shale gas production could be the source of more than half of the increase in global fossil fuel emissions over the past decade.

The MIT study found that “in order for natural gas to be a major component of the nation’s effort to meet greenhouse gas reduction targets [26 to 28 percent below 2005 levels by 2025] over the coming decade, present methods of controlling methane leakage would have to improve by anywhere from 30 to 90 percent.”

Earthquakes mainly due to high pressure wastewater injection

In November 2019, the UK banned fracking in England after a report warned that there could be “unacceptable” impacts on people living near fracking sites, and that it was impossible to predict the magnitude of earthquakes that fracking might cause.

Actually, the earthquakes are not caused by the process of fracking itself, but by the pumping of fracking’s wastewater deep into injection wells for disposal where it can trigger earthquakes. From 1973 to 2008 in the central and eastern US, the yearly number of earthquakes with a magnitude of 3.0 or more averaged 25; today that number is 362. The largest recorded earthquake was a damaging 5.8 magnitude quake in Oklahoma suspected to have been triggered by the disposal of fracking water

Water use for hydrofracking

Between 2011 and 2016, the amount of wastewater produced by oil and gas wells during their first year of production increased by up to 1,440 percent, according to a 2018 Duke University study. The researchers also found that the amount of water used for fracking has risen 770 percent in all major gas and oil production regions of the US. This is likely occurring because drillers must dig longer horizontally to reach more difficult to access gas and oil. The vast use of water could become critical as climate change worsens. Two-thirds of the drilling leases on public land in six Western states are in areas with high water stress. Moreover, the Duke study suggested that if this increasing rate of water use continues, fracking’s water footprint could grow 50-fold by 2030.

Elkind says that some fracking companies are taking these issues of methane leakage, earthquakes, and water use seriously. “The companies that want to be around for the next couple of decades or longer see real danger, not only to the environment, but also to their license to operate, arising from corner-cutting,” he said. “Some of them are absolutely cognizant of this and want to change it. Those companies recognize that if you’re going to employ hydraulic fracturing and horizontal directional drilling, then you have to be able to document that you’re doing so without the kind of risks that arise from poor field practice.”

Too much fracking & natural gas?

One consequence of the increase in US gas production is a gas glut, which has lowered gas prices and caused reverberations throughout the energy sector. In the vast Marcellus Shale in Appalachia, gas prices are half what they were in 2018. In December 2019, the New York Times reported that “companies are shutting down drilling rigs, filing for bankruptcy protection and slashing the value of shale fields they had acquired in recent years.” This slow-down in gas production is hurting manufacturers that once thrived by producing drilling equipment, and their workers. In Texas’ Permian Basin, there is less overtime work and fewer jobs.

Between 2014 and 2017, 29 of the largest shale companies produced 15 percent less than they told investors they would. Shale wells are productive early on, but taper off faster than anticipated. According to the Wall Street Journal, investors are pulling back and banks are tightening lines of credit to oil and gas producers. One energy analytics firm predicts that investment in drilling and fracking will fall 6 percent in 2019, and another 14 percent in 2020.

Nonetheless, the gas industry and investors have plans to build over $70 billion of new gas-fired power plants through 2025 according to two Rocky Mountain Institute reports. As the price of renewables continues to plummet, 90 percent of this proposed new gas infrastructure will be more expensive than equivalent clean energy (wind, solar and storage) by the time it comes online. By the 2030s, these new gas plants will not be economical and will face tens of billions of dollars of stranded assets.

Weighing the pros and cons of unlimited fracking

Any dire predictions about fracking restrictions need to be weighed against the climate crisis. According to a recent report by a coalition of environmental groups, over the next five years the US will likely produce more oil and natural gas than any other country.

North America will be responsible for 85 percent of new global oil and gas development with over 90 percent of US expansion dependent on fracking. The Environmental Integrity Project found that the continued increase in oil, gas and petrochemical production could result in an additional 227 million tons of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere by 2025 — 30 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than were generated in 2018.

Meanwhile, according to CarbonTracker, large oil and gas companies need to cut their production by more than a third by 2040 to meet the Paris climate goals. As it stands, carbon emissions from existing operating oil and gas operations around the world are on track to push us over 1.5˚C of warming, beyond which climate impacts could be catastrophic.

“I think it’s important to recognize the benefits that increased natural gas production has had in terms of that switch away from coal-fired generation,” said Webb. “But at the same time, we know that in order to achieve longer-term climate goals to transition to a net-zero economy, we are going to need to largely phase out natural gas use. There may still be some demand for gas in certain industrial applications and some forms of transport, but if we are to achieve our climate goals, the need for fossil natural gas has to decline.”

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See also: Concern builds over possible shut-in of LNG plants as oversupply sinks prices | S&P Global Market Intelligence, January 29, 2020

Deckers Creek Trail should be protected from injection wells

From the Friends of Deckers Creek, Morgantown, WV, October 30, 2018

This is a follow up to our previous email regarding the permit renewal notice for an injection well in the watershed. Our request for a public hearing was granted.

The WVDEP Office of Oil and Gas will conduct a public hearing concerning the permit application for disposal well on Thursday November 8, 2018 at the Masontown Volunteer Fire Department located at 362 Main Street, Masontown, WV.

Representatives from the WVDEP will be there from 5 pm to 6 pm to answer any questions and will have maps and documents available for review. The public comment period will begin at 6 pm.

Please click here to see full letter regarding hearing.

The Friends of Deckers Creek (FODC) will be in attendance and plans to ask the questions brought forth in our public comment letter that can be viewed here. We invite members of the community to join us and ask any questions that you may have regarding the permit application.

Because this is a permit renewal application, our main goal is to get answers on the processes and procedures in place if a spill or leak were to occur onsite or in transportation. It is also to see if there are any upgrades to the site planned. The site has been running for several years with no issue or impact to the surrounding area that we are aware of. We want to ensure that that continues to be the case.

NOTE: 11/8/18, 5 PM, Masontown VFD, 362 Main Street, Masontown, WV

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Informing Local Residents About the Ohio Valley PetroHub

From the Fresh Water Accountability Project (FWAP), October 31, 2018

FWAP holds meetings with local communities to alert those who will be most directly impacted about the downsides the industry does not want them to know

In the past few weeks, FWAP has been knocking on doors, phone banking, doing direct mailings, and holding public meetings in the area where PTT Global has proposed to build its petrochemical complex in Dilles Bottom, Belmont County, OH. We are doing our best to make sure the community that will be most directly impacted by the PTTG petrochemical complex is informed of the risks associated with the facility, the foreign companies that will profit at the expense of residents’ health, and the alternatives that can provide clean, good, steady jobs in the area.

Please join us for (and spread the word about) our upcoming community meetings:

Wednesday, November 7th, 6 – 8 pm
Shadyside Community Center, 50 East 39th St., Shadyside, OH 43947

Thursday, November 8th, 1 – 3 pm
Ohio County Library, 52 16th Street, Wheeling, WV 26003

Draft Air Permit Issued for Belmont Petrochemical Complex

On Friday, the Ohio EPA issued the draft air permit for the PTTG petrochemical complex. FWAP is currently reviewing the draft permit and will be submitting written comments and encourages everyone to do the same. To be considered as part of the official record, written comments must be received by Ohio EPA/Southeast District Office by 5pm on December 3, 2018. Comments can be mailed to Kimbra Reinbold, Ohio EPA, DAPC Southeast District Office (SEDO), 2195 East Front Street, Logan, Ohio, 43138. Comments can also be faxed to (740) 385-6490.

A hearing on the draft air permit will be held at 6 p.m., Tuesday, November 27, 2018, at Shadyside High School, 3890 Lincoln Ave., Shadyside, OH 43947. FreshWater will be in attendance and encourages everyone to show up for this important hearing!

FWAP has been and will continue to be aggressive in combatting all efforts to turn the Ohio River Valley into the next “cancer alley” through petrochemical development.

For more information on the petrochemical buildout proposed for the Ohio River Valley, check out this informative article by our friends at DeSmog Blog.

Ohio residents point out water pollution & earthquake problems

From an Article by Julie Grant, The Allegheny Front, October 5, 2018

Much of the wastewater from Pennsylvania’s fracking industry is trucked across the border to Ohio. Last year, Pennsylvania and West Virginia contributed nearly half of the more than a billion gallons of frack waste that were injected into underground wells in Ohio. Residents in at least one county say they’ve had enough.

Michelle Garman used to marvel at the 22-acres of land around her home in Vienna, Ohio, less than 10 miles from the Pennsylvania border.

“I would lean out my back window and say, ‘oh my god, I never dreamed of owning this much land’,” she said.

LISTEN: “Ohio Residents Fed Up with Fracking Wastewater”

You can see and hear the injection well from Michelle Garman’s property, less than 10 miles from the Pennsylvania border. Photo: Julie Grant

She didn’t know much about fracking then, let alone frack waste injection wells.

But she remembers News Years Eve 2011, when a 4.0-magnitude earthquake shook nearby Youngstown, Ohio. Around a dozen smaller quakes followed. The state determined that the quakes were caused by an injection well. And one in New Castle, Pennsylvania was linked to fracking as well. The well believed to have caused the Youngstown quakes has been closed permanently.

“That’s poison they’re pumping into the ground”

But Garman’s view changed in 2013 when an injection well was built on the property next door.

“Where your looking at tanks and cement and fencing, it was trees and deer and turkey. And blue jays…and I never see them anymore,” she said.

Garman describes big trucks carrying chemical-laced wastewater that squeal into the site at all hours. She can hear the pump from her yard. And Garman fears for her family.

“How does it affect our health, my son’s health?” she wondered. “I mean, it is toxic. Plain and simple, that’s poison that they’re pumping into the ground.”

Garman says her concerns didn’t get much response from the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), the agency with authority over injection wells. In Ohio, there’s no local control of the oil and gas industry.

And few leaders in her town would criticize the local company, Kleese Development Associates, that built the well next to her property.

Then, in April of 2015, a waste oil spill caused a slew of dead animals and a polluted nearby wetlands. It was caused by another injection well owned by Kleese.

Garman says neighbors contacted her for help.

“People were scared,” she said. “[The were asking], ‘can I drink the water, can I bathe my children in it, can I cook with it?”

The state forced Kleese to shut down the injection well, and it’s still closed. The company could not be reached for comment.

“They don’t want it”

On a recent evening, leaders from townships in Trumbull County gathered at the gazebo in the Brookfield town square. Brookfield Township trustee Gary Lees coached people on how to send letters to their representatives in Columbus asking them to consider legislation that would stop more injection wells in Trumbull County.

Trumbull County already has 17, among the most in the state, and 6 more are in the works. In Hubbard Township, Bobcat LLC has applied to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources for an injection well.

Pittsburgh-based Seneca Resources has drilled a new injection well in Brookfield Township, one of five it plans on the site. The company still needs state approval of its surface facility.

State representative Glenn Holmes says people there are fed up. He references a petition against a plan for the five injection wells by Seneca Resources.

“In a community of about 8,000 people, [we have] 5,000 signatures,” he said. “They don’t want it.”

Holmes has proposed two bills in the Ohio House of Representatives meant to rein in injection wells. One, introduced last spring, would divert more than a third of fees Ohio collects from other state’s frack waste disposal to local governments. Last year, fees for this waste brought in more than $650,000. Holmes says counties should get a cut.

“You have the truck traffic, you have the noise, and you also have the stress and the tension,” he said. “‘Is this going to cause an earthquake?’ Is my aquifer or my well going to be polluted because of this?’”

More recently, Holmes introduced another bill to stop ODNR from permitting any more injection wells in Trumbull County, capping the number of injection wells at 23 per county.

Ted Auch doesn’t think that’s a good idea. He works for the non-profit FracTracker Alliance. Auch worries that a cap per county would actually open up more of the state to injection wells, which have more than doubled in the last five years.

Auch said money from fees should be spent on inspectors.

“You can’t have your number of inspectors be static and your number of wells go up, up and away,” he explained. “That means the number of wells per inspector is going up.”

Auch warns that Ohio has become a dumping ground for other state’s fracking wastewater.

The ODNR says it has strong regulations for injection wells, but declined an interview for this story, as did the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

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Earthquakes above magnitude 3 out of control (USGS)

From an Article by Emily Brodsky, The Conversation, September 2, 2018

Earthquakes in the central and eastern U.S. have increased dramatically in the last decade as a result of human activities. Enhanced oil recovery techniques, including dewatering and hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, have made accessible large quantities of oil and gas previously trapped underground, but often result in a glut of contaminated wastewater as a byproduct.

Energy companies frequently inject wastewater deep underground to avoid polluting drinking water sources. This process is responsible for a surge of earthquakes in Oklahoma and other regions.

The timing of these earthquakes makes it clear that they are linked with deep wastewater injection. But earthquake scientists like me want to anticipate how far from injection sites these quakes may occur.

In collaboration with a researcher in my group, Thomas Goebel, I examined injection wells around the world to determine how the number of earthquakes changed with the distance from injection. We found that in some cases wells could trigger earthquakes up to 10 kilometers (6 miles) away. We also found that, contradictory to conventional wisdom, injecting fluids into sedimentary rock rather than the harder underlying rock often generates larger and more distant earthquakes.

Transmitting Pressure Through Rock

Assessing how far from a well earthquakes might occur has practical consequences for regulation and management. At first glance, one might expect that the most likely place for wastewater disposal to trigger an earthquake is at the site of the injection well, but this is not necessarily true.

Since the 1970s, scientists and engineers have understood that injecting water directly into faults can jack the faults open, making it easier for them to slide in an earthquake. More recently it has become clear that water injection can also cause earthquakes in other ways.

For example, water injected underground can create pressure that deforms the surrounding rock and pushes faults toward slipping in earthquakes. This effect is called poroelasticity. Because water does not need to be injected directly into the fault to generate earthquakes via poroelasticity, it can trigger them far away from the injection well.

Deep disposal wells are typically less than a foot in diameter, so the chance of any individual well intersecting a fault that is ready to have an earthquake is quite small. But at greater distances from the well, the number of faults that are affected rises, increasing the chance of encountering a fault that can be triggered.

Of course, the pressure that a well exerts also decreases with distance. There is a trade-off between decreasing effects from the well and increasing chances of triggering a fault. As a result, it is not obvious how far earthquakes may occur from injection wells.

Where to Inject?

To assess this question, we examined sites around around the world that were well-isolated from other injection sites, so that earthquakes could clearly be associated with a specific well and project. We focused on around 20 sites that had publicly accessible, high-quality data, including accurate earthquake locations.

We found that these sites fell into two categories, depending on the injection strategy used. For context, oil and gas deposits form in basins. As layers of sediments gradually accumulate, any organic materials trapped in these layers are compressed, heated and eventually converted into fossil fuels. Energy companies may inject wastewater either into the sedimentary rocks that fill oil and gas basins, or into older, harder underlying basement rock.

At sites we examined, injecting water into sedimentary rocks generated a gradually decaying cloud of seismicity out to great distances. In contrast, injecting water into basement rock generated a compact swarm of earthquakes within a kilometer of the disposal site. The larger earthquakes produced in these cases were smaller than those produced in sedimentary rock.

This was a huge surprise. The conventional wisdom is that injecting fluids into basement rock is more dangerous than injecting into sedimentary rock because the largest faults, which potentially can make the most damaging earthquakes, are in the basement. Mitigation strategies around the world are premised on this idea, but our data showed the opposite.

How wastewater injection can make earthquakes: In basement rocks (left), injection activates faults in the small region directly connected to the added water, shown in blue. In sedimentary injection, an additional halo of squeezed rock, surrounds the pressurized fluid and can activate more distant faults.

Why would injecting fluids into sedimentary rock cause larger quakes? We believe a key factor is that at sedimentary injection sites, rocks are softer and easier to pressurize through water injection. Because this effect can extend a great distance from the wells, the chances of hitting a large fault are greater. Poroelasticity appears to be generating earthquakes in the basement even when water is injected into overlying sedimentary rocks.

In fact, most of the earthquakes that we studied occurred in the basement, even at sedimentary injection sites. Both sedimentary and basement injection activate the deep, more dangerous faults – and sedimentary sequences activate more of them.

Although it is theoretically possible that water could be transported to the basement through fractures, this would have to happen very fast to explain the rapid observed rise in earthquake rates at the observed distances from injection wells. Poroelasticity appears to be a more likely process.

Avoiding Human-Induced Quakes

Our findings suggest that injection into sedimentary rocks is more dangerous than injecting water into basement rock, but this conclusion needs to be taken with a rather large grain of salt. If a well is placed at random on Earth’s surface, the fact that sedimentary injection can affect large areas will increase the likelihood of a big earthquake.

However, wells are seldom placed at random. In order to efficiently dispose of wastewater, wells must be in permeable rock where the water can flow away from the well. Basement rocks are generally low permeability and therefore are not very efficient areas in which to dispose of wastewater.

One of the few ways that basement rocks can have high permeability is when there are faults that fracture the rock. But, of course, if these high permeability faults are used for injection, the chances of having an earthquake skyrocket. Ideally, injection into basement rock should be planned to avoid known larger faults.

If a well does inject directly into a basement fault, an anomalously large earthquake can occur. The magnitude 5.4 Pohang earthquake in South Korea in 2017 occurred near a geothermal energy site where hydraulic injection had recently been carried out.

The important insight of this study is that injection into sedimentary rocks activates more of these basement rocks than even direct injection. Sedimentary rock injection is not a safer alternative to basement injection.

WV, PA, OH, shale fracking states

Opinion – Editorial by S. Thomas Bond, Charleston Gazette, June 1, 2018

Fracking, the most recent method of extracting gas and oil, is the delight of some and the dread of an increasing part of the population. The arguments for it are exactly two in number: first, civilization is based on energy, and burning fuels is the way to energy; second energy provides lots of jobs, the arguments against fracking are many, keen, and the list is growing.

Unfortunately, many tend to view fossil fuels as the only feasible source of energy. This inability to distinguish between the conventional way of getting energy and energy itself is the product of science illiteracy and not-so-subtle cultivation of the idea by our present day energy industry.

The most pressing argument for ending use of fossil fuels is the accumulation of the colorless, odorless, chemical byproduct of burning, carbon dioxide. It is capable of converting a certain range of the sun’s wavelengths into heat we can feel. This is causing measurable warming worldwide, a widely studied phenomenon with seriously deleterious effects. If you “don’t believe in global warming,” you are like people who don’t believe in evolution or those who think the world is flat, not a sphere. You are beyond evidence and reason, or too lazy to pursue the subject.

Why fracking? Our national reserves of conventional gas and oil are approaching exhaustion, due to profligate use and export for decades. It lays in porous rock, and all that was necessary was to drill down to the reservoir rock and pump from the well. The petroleum would make its way to the well through the pores in the rock, and wells would supply product for decades before becoming uneconomic.

Our use was profligate, and we exported, so conventional began to run out, and we have been importing more and more in recent decades. The Eastern Gas Shales Project ran from 1976 to 1992 at the Morgantown Energy Research Center produced a way to actually break rock in shale reservoirs, which are not naturally permeable. George P. Mitchel worked with government financing to combine this new high hydraulic pressure with bending the drill stem to horizontal, special targeting control to keep the drill in the preferred strata, and a zoo of synthetic chemicals to produce the method that is now called “fracking.”

In the hinterland where fracking is done, fear runs rampant. Experience shows the new method, in practice for only a decade or so, causes a variety of harms, which drillers are unwilling to recognize or pay for. Large acreages are required for drilling, pipelines and pump stations. They cannot be returned to their original use in the foreseeable future. Environmental problems result, such as sediment in streams and destruction of wildlife and domestic animals from the drillng and leaks of synthetic chemicals.

Devaluation of property results. Who wants to live or farm near the noise, light and smells of this industry? Roads are broken by a thousand or more trips to each well site and removal of waste. The tax money pays for this cost.

Sickness is well documented by over 1,700 medical research articles, illness such as asthma and other respiratory problems, abortion and light birth weights, heart problems, and endocrine gland disruption.

There are serious problems with fracking compared to alternate energy industry. It is high capital and low labor, compared to alternate forms of energy. A lot of jobs at the construction phase, but these last only a few weeks, followed by few workers to operate the equipment. The jobs are specialized, so little is open to local men (very few women want this kind or work) except truck driving and many cases are known where drivers are kept on the job 24 or more hours straight.

Fracked wells commonly have an economic life of 6 to 8 years, and the recovery is seldom more than 8 percent of the oil or gas in place. No chance of recovery of the rest is insight. Increase in production per well is due to longer laterals (horizontal drilling segments of the well), not any real efficiency.

According to a report in a December Wall Street Journal titled “Wall Street Tells Frackers to Stop Counting Barrels, Start Making Profits,” the fracking industry has lost an amazing $280 billion since it began.

So what is the power of fracking? Politics! The accumulated law and practice that allows the industry to rip off land and mineral owners, make its neighbors sick and gets the public to pay for roads and emergencies. Cozy relations with glad handing legislators and officials is a big factor. And not to be forgotten is inertia due to lack of scientific awareness, and general reluctance to change the way things are done.

Fracking is power over people and property, over a livable world, and over alternatives the world must have.

>>> S. Thomas Bond, of Jane Lew, is a retired chemistry teacher.

Sandstone bricks off Pawnee Co. Bank (9/2/16)

From Oklahoma City, Associated Press, April 7, 2018

Sandstone bricks from the historic Pawnee County Bank litter the sidewalk after an early morning earthquake in Pawnee, Oka., on Sept. 3, 2016.

COVINGTON, Okla. — The Oklahoma Corporation Commission has directed a wastewater disposal well to reduce its volume of injection after more than a dozen earthquakes rattled part of northwest Oklahoma since Friday, April 6, 2018.

The U.S. Geological Survey recorded three quakes Monday, including one near Covington now rated magnitude 4.5 after a preliminary rating of 4.3. Magnitude 3.3 and 2.8 quakes were also recorded Monday in the area about 55 miles north of Oklahoma City.

Garfield County Emergency Management Director Mike Honigsberg says there are no reports of injury or severe damage. Damage typically begins with magnitude 4.0 or stronger earthquakes, but Honigsberg notes that the area is very rural.

Many of the thousands of earthquakes in Oklahoma in recent years have been linked to wastewater injection by oil and natural gas producers.

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Parts of Oklahoma now have the same earthquake risk as California — and a new study found a scarily direct link to fracking

From an Article by Erin Brodwin, Business Insider, February 2, 2018

Oklahoma is being pummeled by earthquakes, a phenomenon scientists have strongly tied to wastewater injection and the practice of fracking.

A new study highlights just how strong that connection is. According to the US Geological Survey, the earthquake threat level in some parts of the state may now be approaching the level for some parts of California.

Over the course of a few days in August, Oklahoma was pummeled by seven earthquakes. The wave started on a Tuesday night, when five quakes struck the central part of the state in less than 28 hours. The shaking continued extended into the early hours of Thursday as two more hit.

Although none of those quakes was severe enough to cause significant damage, scientists are increasingly concerned about their cause. Rather than emanating from natural tectonic shifts deep inside the Earth, these temblors appear to be the result of human activity.

Hydraulic fracturing, more commonly known as fracking, involves jamming water deep into the Earth’s layers of rocks to force open crevices and extract the oil or gas buried inside. For several years, researchers have shown a link between wastewater injection, a process that’s used to dispose of waste fluids from a number of industrial activities and is similar to fracking, and the incidence of earthquakes in a region, but a new study highlights just how strong that connection is.

The authors of the latest paper, published this week in the journal Science, found that they could use the depth of the wastewater injection sites to roughly predict how big the earthquake they caused would be.

In other words, the deeper the injection site, the stronger the quake.

The researchers were confident enough in their assertions to make a recommendation:”Reducing the depth of injections could significantly reduce the likelihood of larger, damaging earthquakes,” Thomas Gernon, an associate professor of earth science at the University of Southampton, wrote in an article for The Conversation.

Oklahoma’s earthquake threat level is now predicted to be roughly the same as California

Until recently, earthquakes in Oklahoma were few and far between. In 2010, the state experienced just 41 tremors. By comparison, Southern California has about 10,000 earthquakes each year.

But that disparity may be shrinking. According to a forecast from the US Geological Survey, the risk of a significant and damaging earthquake in some parts of Oklahoma is now roughly the same as the risk in parts of California.

“The chance of having Modified Mercalli Intensity VI or greater (damaging earthquake shaking) is 5-12% per year in north-central Oklahoma and southern Kansas, similar to the chance of damage caused by natural earthquakes at sites in parts of California,” the forecast reads.

Over the past few years, Oklahoma has weathered hundreds of significant quakes— more than 900 in 2015 alone, according to The Conversation — as have parts of several other Midwestern states. The region is replete with eons-old fault lines that went quiet long ago, but wastewater operations appear to be re-awakening some of those faults.

Much (but not all) of that wastewater injection is associated with the fracking boom, which has led the practice to become more common in recent years, especially in Oklahoma.

“Our study is just the first step,” Gernon said. “We need the support of researchers, operators and regulators, to ensure this approach has a lasting impact on reducing man-made earthquakes.”