Fracking waste disposal in Guernsey County, OH. (These activities are known risks of creating earthquakes.)

Environmental Essay by Lisa C. Lieb, Revelator Voices, March 27, 2023

Let’s Protect This Place: A region historically plagued by industrial pollution is overwhelmed with unconventional oil and gas development. The Allegheny Plateau is a lower-lying portion of the Appalachian Mountain Range that extends from southern and central New York to northern and western Pennsylvania, eastern Ohio, northern and western West Virginia, and eastern Kentucky.

Why it matters: The plateau consists of areas of gently sloping hills in the north and west of the region as well as rugged valleys in the south and east. It overlies the Marcellus Shale and Utica Shale, sedimentary rock formations. The region is rich in natural resources, including hardwoods, iron ore, silica, coal, oil and natural gas.

The abundance of these resources supported development in the region and were integral to the local steel, glass, rail and extraction industries.

Prior to widespread logging between 1890 and 1920, the area hosted old-growth forests containing red spruce, eastern white pine, eastern hemlock, sugar maple, black oak, white oak, yellow birch and American beech.

But the forest’s makeup is now different, favoring oaks, maples, hickories, American beech and yellow birch. Though fragmented and much less mature than the old-growth forests, today’s forests continue to play a vital role in ecosystems, serving as habitats for the federally endangered Indiana bat as well as locally endangered or at-risk species such as little brown bats, northern flying squirrels and blackpoll warblers.

The region hosts the Ohio River watershed and confluence, the Allegheny National Forest in New York and Pennsylvania, and the Wayne National Forest in Ohio.

The threat: Unconventional oil and gas development has boomed in the region over the past decade. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates that the Marcellus and Utica shale plays contain approximately 214 trillion cubic feet of recoverable natural gas, making the Allegheny Plateau a lucrative location for hydraulic fracturing, or “fracking.”

Already more than 13,000 unconventional wells have been drilled in Pennsylvania. Fracking itself is a resource intense process, requiring between 2 and 20 million gallons of water per well. A 2014 study estimated that in Pennsylvania, 80% of the water used for fracking comes from streams, rivers, and lakes, thus potentially altering water temperature and levels of dissolved oxygen. This water is combined with sand and a mixture of hazardous chemicals, which may include methanol, ethylene glycol and propargyl alcohol.

Between 20-25% of the water that is injected into the well returns to the surface. This flowback water often has higher salinity and has been known to contain barium, arsenic, benzene and radium. While recycling of flowback is becoming more common, other methods of disposal include underground injection, application to road surfaces, treatment at public waste facilities, and discharging it onto rivers, streams and lakes.

Near fracking sites in West Virginia, elevated levels of barium and strontium were found in feathers of Louisiana waterthrushes, native songbirds who make their home in brooks and wooded swamps. In northwestern Pennsylvania, crayfish and brook trout living in fracked streams were found to have increased levels of mercury. Fish diversity is also reduced in streams that have been fracked.

Fracking consumes land, too. Each fracking well requires 3-7 acres. In Pennsylvania over 700,000 acres of state forest land are leased or available for gas production. Well pads, pipelines and other fracking infrastructure fragment forests, alter their ecology, and reduce biodiversity. Appalachian azure butterflies and federally threatened northern wild monkshood — purple-flowering herbaceous perennials found in New York and Ohio — are both sensitive to forest fragmentation.

In addition to the direct impacts of fracking, the availability of natural gas in the Marcellus and Utica shale plays attracts petrochemical development to the region. Shell Polymers Monaca initiated operations in November 2022 at a newly constructed 386-acre petrochemical complex in southwestern Pennsylvania, along the Ohio River.

The plant manufactures virgin polyethylene pellets, which will be largely be used for production of single-use plastic products. In addition to releasing hazardous air pollutants, volatile organic compounds and particulate matter, this ethane “cracker” plant will emit 2.2 million tons of carbon dioxide per year.

The plant’s existence will also fuel fracking in the region; it is anticipated that it will require between 100 and 200 new wells each year in order to supply natural gas for its productions. Other petrochemical companies, including Exxon, PTT Global and Odebrecht, have reportedly been considering building similar complexes in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia.

My place in this place: I was born and raised in the area, and my family’s roots in southwestern Pennsylvania go back several generations. Some of my most cherished memories involve Pennsylvania’s forests, rivers and streams. As a child I loved my family’s summer pilgrimages to our cabin, a rustic building that had been converted from a one-room schoolhouse in the Pennsylvania Wilds. At “camp” we fished for yellow perch, smallmouth bass and walleye in the Sinnemahoning Creek and caught crayfish by hand. We sunned ourselves on the rocks along the river bank when the water was warm. In the evenings we walked on quiet, narrow roads in hopes of spotting an eastern elk in a grassy field.

I now live in Beaver County, Pennsylvania, one mile from the Shell cracker plant. I can observe the plant’s flaring from my kitchen window, which often creates an ominous orange glow in the night sky. To me the plant doesn’t symbolize job creation or a rebounding local economy, despite the assertions of local and state politicians. I see the plant as the perpetuation of a hopeless dependence on fossil fuels and corporate profit at the expense of ecological integrity. I worry that fracking and an associated petrochemical buildout will destroy already fragile ecosystems throughout my home in the Allegheny Plateau.

Who’s protecting it now: There are a variety of environmental groups located in the region. No Petro PA is an organization that resists fracking and pipeline development in Pennsylvania, Ohio and West Virginia. More locally the Beaver County Marcellus Awareness Community in western Pennsylvania opposes fracking and seeks to protect local community members from its harmful effects.

With the rise of the Shell cracker plant, the group also formed Eyes on Shell, a community organization that aims to hold Shell accountable for its activity and advocates for the surrounding communities’ health and safety. These are just three of the many grassroots organizations working to protect the air, soil, water, wildlife and communities in the region.

The national organization, FracTracker, also provides extensive data on oil and natural gas wells, pipelines, legislation and environmental health.

What this place needs: Ideally Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia will follow in the footsteps of New York and institute a ban on fracking in light of the environmental and health risks associated with unconventional gas and oil development. However, given their strong ties to the fossil fuel industry, it is unlikely that this will occur. Banning fracking on public land in the region, such as in state forests and county parks, in a practical first step in combatting forest fragmentation and pollution.

At a regional level, regulations should be put in place to protect the water quality of the Ohio River. The Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission, a multistate organization working with the federal government, could ban fracking in the Ohio River Basin in order to protect the river and its watershed. The Delaware River Basin Commission has successfully prohibited fracking within the Delaware River Basin; the rules developed by the commission could be adapted for use by the Ohio River Valley Water Sanitation Commission.

Additional government oversight would help to protect water quality in the region. Presently fracking is exempt from the Safe Water Drinking Act and therefore isn’t regulated by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Ending this exemption could increase water quality and safety within the Allegheny Plateau.

Increased transparency from oil and gas companies is also required to protect the region’s water. As of July 2022, California is the only state in the country that requires full public disclosure of all chemicals used in fracking. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio must implement policies that require full public disclosure of chemicals used in all phases of the fracking process.

Fracking caused small earthquakes in western Pennsylvania, PA-DEP confirms

From an Article by Dennis Owens, ABC News (WHTM – Harrisburg), February 17, 2017

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection made a big announcement Friday via an online webinar. “The Lawrence County event is properly classified as an induced tectonic seismic event,” droned an unseen scientist.

It was a webinar that only a geologist could love. Lots of science talk, geology terms and slides. There were no faces to be found. But we found the guy behind the Power Point and drilled down for a translation, in English.

“We found a connection between oil and gas activities and these detected seismic events, essentially earthquakes,” explained Seth Pelepko, a geologist who’s also in the DEP’s Oil and Gas program as the Chief of Well Plugging.

The report found that last April in Lawrence County near the Ohio border, five small earthquakes were caused by hydraulic fracturing or fracking in the Utica shale which is deeper than the more frequently mentioned Marcellus shale.

The DEP found that those earthquakes were the equivalent of a lightning strike, that they were caused by a very specific type of drilling in a very specific spot of instability. “There’s multiple contributing factors and they almost have to arrive in a certain combination to trigger an event,” Pelepko said.

The earthquakes are the first in Pennsylvania linked to drilling. The industry points out that there are more than 7,000 well statewide that have been drilled without incident. In a statement, it called the quakes, “isolated and exceptionally rare.”

But environmental group, Sierra Club PA, sees it differently.

“It’s the kind of activity that should not be allowed to move forward at this point because we know that it’s not safe,” Joanne Kilgour, Director of Sierra Club PA chapter, said.

The club typically opposes fracking because it believes fracking endangers drinking water, and now causes earthquakes. “It’s one more evidence that fracking poses threats to our communities,” Kilgour said. “We need to think very seriously about the kind of energy future that we want here in Pennsylvania.”

But fracking and natural gas drilling has been a fiscal geyser, so it’s not going anywhere anytime soon. Nor should it, says the DEP, which has increased its earthquake detection and is insisting keeping a close eye on drillers.

“I think the average person shouldn’t be concerned about this,” Pelepko said.

The five earthquakes were small, around 2.0 on the Richter scale, too small to be felt by people standing on the surface and only registering on seismometers.

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Fracking Earthquakes Confirmed in Penna.

Fracking Earthquakes in Pennsylvania

From an Article by David Pacchioli, Penn State University News, January 25, 2017

Last summer, with funding from the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources, a Penn State team led by geophysicist Andrew Nyblade completed a major expansion of the Pennsylvania Seismic Monitoring Network, creating a system of 30 seismic stations spread across the Commonwealth. Located at Penn State campuses and state parks, the stations contain state-of-the-art ground motion sensors and GPS clocks. The added coverage provides for much more uniform seismic monitoring than was possible before.

Photo: Seismograph traces due to blasting activity look very different from those due to earthquakes (shown above).

Why do we need an expanded seismic monitoring network in Pennsylvania?

There are three reasons. One is that there are areas of natural seismicity in Pennsylvania—one in the Lancaster-Reading area, where there have been magnitude 4 earthquakes, and the other just south of Lake Erie on the Pennsylvania-Ohio border. The largest earthquake yet recorded in Pennsylvania was the Pymatuning earthquake of 1998, just south of Erie. That was a 5.2 magnitude event. When you get to magnitude 4 and 5 events, they can be felt, and they have potential to cause damage to structures, so we need to better understand those zones of seismicity.

Then there are the reasons related to oil and gas activities—induced seismicity, possibly by fracking and more probably by wastewater disposal.

How much seismic monitoring has been done here before, and what did it find?

In 2013-14 we were able to take advantage of a temporary array of seismic stations, part of the NSF EarthScope project, to get a good baseline read on seismicity within the state. What we found was that over 99 percent of the seismic activity in the state actually comes from blasting. There is blasting in coal mines and quarries going on all the time, and some of those blasts are equivalent to magnitude 2, 2.5 earthquakes. So there’s all this background seismic activity, and we need to be able to detect and locate those events so that we can discriminate between them and anything else that might be happening.

Are fracking-related earthquakes a real possibility in Pennsylvania?

We don’t yet know for sure, but Pennsylvania may have had its first fracking-induced seismicity already. In late April [2016], we had a series of seismic events in Lawrence County, near the Ohio border, that have been correlated with a well that was being fracked there.

The bigger concern, though, is with seismicity that’s induced from wastewater disposal. The flowback waters from fracked wells, and also the wastewater that comes from conventional oil and gas wells, has to be disposed of, and a common practice is to pump it back into the ground.  There’s been a huge ramp-up of seismicity in places in Oklahoma, Kansas, Texas, and some places in Canada, and most of that is related to wastewater disposal, not to fracking itself.

Would it be possible that any induced activity would be on a par with natural earthquakes that have been recorded in the state?

Yes. In Oklahoma there have been events induced by wastewater injection that were 5.7, 5.8 magnitude. Magnitude 4s have been recorded in Arkansas and Texas related to wastewater injection. The largest fracking-related events reported so far are magnitude 4s, and those have been in Canada. So there is potential for magnitude 4s and 5s—potentially damaging earthquakes—that could be induced by either fracking or wastewater disposal.

Is there something we can do to mitigate the concern?

Absolutely. As we monitor seismicity across the state, we can detect small events when they happen and determine if they are related to fracking or to wastewater disposal, and if so notify the Department of Environmental Protection, who can then ask the well operator to shut down or take other steps. That’s one of the main purposes of the network, to be able to detect events before they get too large, so that the state authorities can take remedial action.

>>> Andrew Nyblade, professor of geosciences, studies seismology and tectonics in Africa, Antarctica, and North America. He is co-director of the Marcellus Center for Outreach and Research.

>>> This interview first appeared in the Fall 2016 issue of Research/Penn State magazine.

New research indicates that wastewater disposal wells—and sometimes fracking itself—can induce earthquakes

From Sharon Wilson, EARTHWORKS’ Oil and Gas Accountability Project, May 3, 2014
 
Ohio regulators did something last month that had never been done before: they drew a tentative link between shale gas fracking and an increase in local earthquakes. As fracking has grown in the U.S., so have the number of earthquakes—there were more than 100 recorded quakes of magnitude 3.0 or larger each year between 2010 and 2013, compared to an average of 21 per year over the preceding three decades. That includes a sudden increase in seismic activity in usually calm states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Ohio—states that have also seen a rapid increase in oil and gas development. Shale gas and oil development is still growing rapidly—more than eightfold between 2007 and 2012—but if fracking and drilling can lead to dangerous quakes, America’s homegrown energy revolution might be in for an early end.

But seismologists are only now beginning to grapple with the connection between oil and gas development and earthquakes. New research being presented at the annual meeting of the Seismological Society of America this week shows that wastewater disposal wells—deep holes drilled to hold hundreds of millions of gallons of fluid produced by oil and gas wells—may be changing the stress on existing faults, inducing earthquakes that wouldn’t have happened otherwise. Those quakes can occur tens of miles away from the wells themselves, further than scientists had previously believed. And they can be large as well—researchers have now linked two quakes in 2011 with a magnitude greater than 5.0 to wastewater wells.

“This demonstrates there is a significant hazard,” said Justin Rubinstein, a research geophysicist at the U.S. Geological Survey. “We need to address ongoing seismicity.”

Rubinstein was speaking on a teleconference call with three other seismologists who have been researching how oil and gas development might be able to induce quakes. All of them noted that the vast majority of wastewater disposal sites and oil and gas wells weren’t connected to increased quake activity—which is a good thing, since there are more than 30,000 disposal wells alone scattered around the country. But scientists are still trying to figure out which wells might be capable of inducing strong quakes, though the sheer volume of fluid injected into the ground seems to be the driving factor (that’s one reason why hydraulic fracturing itself rarely seems to induce quakes—around 5 million gallons, or 18.9 million L, of fluid is used in fracking, far less than the amount of fluid that ends up in a disposal well).

“There are so many injection operations throughout much of the U.S. now that even though a small fraction might induce quakes, those quakes have contributed dramatically to the seismic hazard, especially east of the Rockies,” said Arthur McGarr, a USGS scientist working on the subject.

What scientists need to do is understand that seismic hazard—especially if oil and gas development in one area might be capable of inducing quakes that could overwhelm structures that were built for a lower quake risk. That’s especially important given that fracking is taking place in many parts of the country—like Oklahoma or Ohio—that haven’t had much experience with earthquakes, and where both buildings and people likely have a low tolerance to temblors. Right now there’s very little regulation regarding how oil and gas development activities should be adjusted to reduce quake risk—and too little data on the danger altogether.

“There’s a very large gap on policy here,” says Gail Atkinson, a seismologist at the University of Western Ontario. “We need extensive databases on the wells that induce seismicity and the ones that don’t.”

So far the quakes that seem to have been induced by oil and gas activity have shaken up people who live near wells, but haven’t yet caused a lot of damage. But that could change if fracking and drilling move to a part of the country that already has clear existing seismic risks—like California, which has an estimated 15 billion barrels of oil in the Monterey Shale formation that could only be accessed through fracking (limited fracking has been done in California, but only in the lightly populated center of the state). Environmentalists who seek to block shale oil development in the Golden State have seized on fears of fracking-induced quakes, and a bill in the state legislature would establish a moratorium on fracking until research shows it can be done safely.

Regulation is slowly beginning to catch up. In Ohio, officials this month established new guidelines that would allow regulators to halt active hydraulic fracturing if seismic monitors detect a quake with a magnitude of 1.0 or higher. But it will ultimately be up to the oil and gas industry to figure out a way to carry out development without making the earth shake.

“I am confident that it is only a matter of time before we figure out how to exercise these technologies in a way that avoids significant quakes,” says Atkinson. Otherwise the fracking revolution may turn out to be short-lived.
 
=== EARTHWORKS:  Protecting Communities and the Environment