Permian earthquakes should push Texas officials to work on shale drilling

On the evening of December 28, Sally Potet was driving home after dropping her granddaughter at her daughter’s home when her husband called to ask if she had accidentally crashed her Bronco Sport in the garage.

In another town, this might be an odd question. But on this night in the small town of Stanton, about 100 miles south of Lubbock, quite a few people were asking something similar.

“When I got home, everyone was in their front yards because they thought people had crashed into their homes,” Potet recalls.

Potet, the city’s mayor, knew better. She hadn’t noticed anything herself when she was driving but when her daughter called a little earlier to ask if she had felt a tremor, Petit knew immediately what it was: an earthquake.

The 4.6-magnitude earthquake that struck Stanton that evening may have been “the worst earthquake we’ve seen,” Bottet told the editorial board recently, but these abrupt tectonic shifts are hardly anomalous these days in the fracking towns of West Texas.

In fact, three days later, on New Year’s Eve, the city recorded a 4.2-magnitude earthquake, capping the year in which scientists recorded more than 4,000 earthquakes across Texas in 2021, according to TexNet, the earthquake monitoring network operated by the Texas office. Economic geology. People reported feeling more than 150 of these earthquakes, with 17 recording a “large” magnitude of 4.0 or higher, enough to break walls and build foundations. The vast majority occurred in the Permian Basin region, the gold mine of oil and natural gas that has kept cities like Stanton afloat for decades.

Research strongly links the increase in seismicity in Texas over the past decade — the number of earthquakes has risen 74 percent from 2020 and is eight times higher than in 2017, according to TexNet — with oil and gas operations, especially deep injection. From sewage from oil fields to disposal wells thousands of feet underground. When well operators pump gas and oil through production wells, they separate the groundwater that comes with it. This water is then pumped down a deeper set of wells into a porous layer of rock. Decades of such injections have created such pressure along ancient fault lines that they cause earthquakes with alarming frequency.

In essence, Texas’ endless quest for cheap energy that Americans demand has led to drilling practices that have turned our state’s once benign subterranean geology into a powder keg. Not that these tremors are expected to pack the kind of earthquake more commonly associated with giant earthquakes in Northern California, for example, but that they fundamentally altered the geology of the land beneath communities across Texas where oil and gas are extracted, and waters continued to be dumped. accompanying sewage. This increased risks to property and lives, admits even the most ardent evangelists of oil and gas, such as Potet.

“We still need to drill for oil, we need oil,” says Petit. “It’s kind of scary, though. You think, ‘Well, if they keep digging and keep doing anything that causes it, is it going to get any worse?”

It’s hard to say how bad things are. For years, the Texas Railroad Commission, the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas production, refused to acknowledge the scientific evidence linking fracking to earthquakes, going so far as to hire a seismologist to reduce the work of scientists studying the issue, Morning News reported in 2016. Even with acknowledgment Now with the scientific evidence linking fracking and earthquakes, the commission has largely allowed injection well drilling – and related wastewater disposal – to continue unabated. The Wall Street Journal reported that Texas oil producers pumped about 342 million barrels of water into brine disposal wells in 2020.

This is beginning to change, as constant tremors around the Permian Basin finally shake the Commission out of its organizational stupor. Last month, the commission ordered the suspension of deep brine injections in a particularly seismic zone in the Midland Basin, including Stanton, and the indefinite withdrawal of permits for 33 disposal wells. Paul Takahashi of the Chronicle reports that the action stripped 14 companies, including Houston-based ConocoPhillips and Midland-based Ratler Midstream, of the ability to dump nearly 1 million barrels of brine.

Environmentalists and operators have praised the moratorium on saline injections, but the measure is only a temporary solution, with a few obvious, cheap alternatives that would win the industry over. Trucking water to disposal wells elsewhere is expensive. Other methods such as treating wastewater and draining it into surface water or using it to make road salt – which can then leach chemicals into groundwater – can be environmentally disastrous.

The most promising and safest method – recycling and reusing wastewater for shale cracking and production of crude oil and natural gas – is still far from becoming the industry standard. Only about 9 percent of the brine produced in shale fields was recycled last year, and analysts say there is nearly insufficient pipeline capacity for recycled water to offset the use of disposal wells. Last year, the legislature created a task force to identify ways to reduce industry’s dependence on fresh aquifers, given the country’s vulnerability to drought.

But we cannot sit idly by and wait for the thoughts that hit us in the face before the earthquake. Scientists assert that as long as wastewater continues to press on fault lines, earthquakes are likely to continue for the foreseeable future. When fracking states such as Oklahoma and Ohio presented evidence linking fracking with earthquakes, regulators in both states acted responsibly to close sewage disposal wells indefinitely or issue new permit rules for drilling rigs. After the well was closed, Oklahoma actually experienced a decrease in the frequency of earthquakes for three consecutive years through 2018, although the area continues to experience seismic activity.

While it is imperative that the industry come up with a cleaner and safer way to dispose of wastewater, the Railroad Commission must also tighten its rules for drilling injection wells to ensure that water is not constantly blown into the already saturated bedrock in the Permian Basin. We should consider ourselves lucky that cities like Stanton haven’t really experienced a serious earthquake but we can’t continue to rely on such good fortune.

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