Texas earthquakes: linking oil drilling and fracking to thousands of earthquakes

It was a big earthquake winter in West Texas. Midland County was rocked by a series of small earthquakes on December 15 and 16, followed a week later by a 4.5-magnitude earthquake, the second strongest to hit the region in the past decade. Then a 4.2-magnitude earthquake shook the city of Stanton and another series of smaller earthquakes struck nearby Reeves County.

This is a disturbing pattern for a situation that, until recently, was not an earthquake at all. Prior to 2008, Texans experienced only one or two perceptible earthquakes per year. But Texas now experiences hundreds of annual earthquakes of at least a magnitude of 2.5, the minimum that can be felt by humans, and thousands of smaller earthquakes.

The worrying reason: Seismologists say one of the state’s largest industries is upsetting a delicate balance deep in the earth. They blame the oil and gas business—particularly a technology called wastewater injection—for awakening old fault lines, turning a historically stable region into a shaky region, and opening the door to bigger earthquakes for which Texas might not be ready.

The state is finally trying to change that. In December, the Texas Railroad — the government agency that regulates oil and gas operations and no longer has anything to do with rail — stopped sewage injections at 33 sites across an area home to more than half a million people. This is a notable turnaround for the railway commission, which until recently did not acknowledge a link between oil and gas operations and earthquakes, and it may be a sign of how dangerous earthquakes can be.

Historically, Texas has been seismically drowsy. Its fault lines were mostly dormant for several eons. “At one point, Texas was a plate boundary,” Heather Deschon, chair of the Earth sciences department at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, told Vox. “All of those flaws are still there. They just buried 300 million years of sedimentation and the formation of the Gulf of Mexico and the building of new mountains. So they’re very deep, but they’re still there.”

When faults are active, as in seismic regions like California and the Pacific Northwest, Deschon explained, they constantly put out energy. The rocks in those faults deform for years before they fracture in an earthquake. “When you’re not at the plate boundary, the constant reloading and energy breaking doesn’t happen anymore. But some amount of energy is left on those faults,” Deschon said. Wastewater injection can help release it.

The early signs of trouble appeared in 2008, when Dallas-area residents sensed a series of small earthquakes originating in the nearby Fort Worth Basin. More earthquakes followed, and a magnitude 4 quake struck a town southwest of Dallas in 2015. No damage was reported, but according to the US Geological Survey, the impact of a 4 magnitude earthquake can include: “Dishes, windows, and doors rattle; walls make A cracking sound. Feeling like a heavy truck hitting the building. Parked cars shook noticeably.”

Earthquakes in West Texas increased from a total of 19 in 2009 to more than 1,600 in 2017, according to a 2019 study, exactly coinciding with the rise in wastewater injections in the area. Nearly 2,000 earthquakes hit West Texas in 2021, a record number. According to TexNet, the University of Texas earthquake catalog, 17 of those earthquakes were of magnitude 4 or higher.

Earthquakes surged along with wastewater injections into Texas. This graph shows earthquakes around Pecos City. Red indicates earthquakes. Green is oil production, blue is waste water disposal in millions of barrels. (Yellow shows rising natural gas production.) Adapted from “Spread Induced Seismic Activity in the Permian Basin, Texas” by Robert J.

The importance of Texas to US oil and gas production is hard to overestimate. The Permian Basin, which stretches through western Texas and eastern New Mexico, is responsible for 40 percent of US oil production and 15 percent of the country’s natural gas supply, with tens of thousands of wells spread across the landscape. Hydraulic fracturing, also known as fracturing, is the most common drilling method in the Permian period.

Both traditional drilling and hydraulic fracturing methods can cause the same problem: Each year, drilling releases billions of gallons of brine and saline wastewater that have been trapped underground for thousands of years. The water flows back to the surface along with the oil and gas (and in the case of fracking, the extra water is used to get the oil and gas out of the shale). That water has to go somewhere, and for decades the conventional wisdom has been to simply re-inject it deep into the ground, somewhere that doesn’t get in the way of oil and gas wells.

Often, this water is injected into deep aquifers that are often located at the edges of fault lines. Pumping more water into the aquifers, Deschon said, is a bit like sitting on an old mattress with a balanced cup of water at one end. The extra pressure upsets the balance of things, and the cup might fall off—which, in this metaphor, means the fault can slip and release energy in the earthquake.

In areas where wastewater injection has subsided, often because oil and gas operations in the area have become less profitable, earthquakes have also decreased. But hydraulic fracturing continues to rise, generating more wastewater that can lead to more earthquakes.

Oil and gas companies say they support the Railroad Commission’s restrictions, which mirror the steps regulators took in Oklahoma when they tightened disposal operations in 2014 after years of injection-triggered earthquakes in that state. “None of us want any seismic activity, so we’re in favor of that action,” Ben Shepherd, president of the Permian Basin Oil Association, told the Houston Chronicle. But Shepherd praised the Railroad Commission for limiting its regulations to specific wells, rather than “painting the entire area with a wide brush.”

To date, none of the earthquakes caused by wastewater injection in the Dallas-Fort Worth area or around the Permian Basin have been blamed for injuries or damage to buildings. The Houston Chronicle’s editorial board recently wrote, “We should consider ourselves lucky that cities like Stanton haven’t had a really serious earthquake, but we can’t continue to rely on such good fortune.”

DeShon also argued that there is still cause for concern. “Once you start having earthquakes in an area, the earthquake risk goes up,” she said. “There are still many unknowns in such a complex system.”

One unknown that remains is where the wastewater should go. A spokesperson said the Texas Railroad Commission is part of a consortium studying new ways to recycle water produced from drilling. Currently, operators of wastewater disposal wells can “apply to amend their permits for shallow injection and blocking of deep portions of modified disposal wells,” the spokesperson added. The permit for the operator of at least one disposal well has already been modified.

Then there is the issue of wastewater injection into parts of the Permian Basin that has not yet been restricted by the Railways Commission. If larger earthquakes rock populated areas, Deschon said, Texans wouldn’t be ready for them — the infrastructure was built with hurricanes in mind, and most Texans don’t know what to do in the event of an earthquake.

“My personal opinion is that any community that has been experiencing earthquakes – and we’ve seen an earthquake increase in magnitude – should not be afraid, but should be told what to do in the event of an earthquake,” Deschon said. “They need to know how to fall and cover and grab. You don’t run out of buildings, you don’t stand under doorways. Wait for the shaking to stop. There’s an educational element that has to happen, and I don’t know it is.”

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