Natural or hydraulic fracturing? Study reveals cause of past Texas earthquakes

In recent weeks, North Texas residents have felt aftershocks from several earthquakes that originated near Hermley in Scurry County, about 250 miles west of downtown Dallas.

The cause of these earthquakes has not yet been determined, but a scientist at the US Geological Survey told the Dallas Morning News that they may have been caused by oil and gas operations.

A recent study by scientists at Southern Methodist University confirms this connection by revealing how past earthquakes have been linked to hydraulic fracturing.

In a paper published in June in the journal The Seismic Record , researchers found that pre-2017 earthquakes in the Delaware Basin—part of the Permian Basin in western Texas and southern New Mexico—did not originate deep underground as previously thought. Instead, they occurred at shallow depths that correspond to where fracking wastewater was being disposed of.

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The study represents an advance in how scientists can detect and pinpoint the cause of earthquakes, especially those that occurred before the fracking boom of the past decade, said Dino Huang, an assistant professor at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin, who was not involved in the study.

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Wastewater injection is one way to dispose of water produced by hydraulic fracturing, a process that typically uses millions of gallons of water mixed with sand and other chemicals to break up underground rock formations that contain oil and natural gas.

The remaining wastewater can be reused for further hydraulic fracturing or injected underground into brine disposal wells. If the injection is near a fault line—a weak break between two blocks of rock—the pressure can trigger an earthquake. A 2019 study investigating earthquakes in North Texas found that pressure changes from disposal wells make fault lines more likely to rupture.

In states like Oklahoma and Kansas, wastewater injection has been linked to seismic activity. That connection has also been seen in Texas, said Heather DeShon, chair of the Roy M. Huffington Department of Geosciences at Southern Methodist University and co-author of the new study.

The Fort Worth Basin, located in northern Texas and southwestern Oklahoma, was one of the first shale basins—a geological formation that contains natural gas—to be exploited by hydraulic fracturing, DeShon said. “Since 2008, Southern Methodist University has been studying earthquakes in the basin, and we and other colleagues have finally been able to link those earthquakes to wastewater disposal,” he said.

The key to this investigation is knowing where the quake started, said Nadine Egonin, an assistant professor of geophysics at the University of Texas at Dallas, who was not involved in the new study.

“If your location or depth is completely wrong, you might attribute the earthquake to something else,” Egonen said.

Researcher Heather DeShon, assistant professor of geophysics at Southern Methodist University, points to a slide as she discusses the impact of oil and gas drilling on North Texas earthquakes during a news conference at the university Tuesday, April 21, 2015, in Dallas.

Prior to 2017, there was a great deal of uncertainty about the depth of the earthquake, especially in the Permian Basin, an area rich in local oil and natural gas. This was partly due to the lack of sufficient seismic stations near where the quakes occurred.

The basic rule is that to get a good earthquake [resolution]“You want to have a seismic station at twice the depth of the earthquake,” DeShon said. “So if the earthquake is really shallow, like two kilometers deep, you’re going to need at least one seismic station at four to five kilometers deep.”

The state-funded seismic network, known as TexNet, was licensed in 2015 and implemented in 2017. This expanded the number of seismic sensors available to detect seismic activity, as well as doing so with greater accuracy.

To clear up this mystery about earthquakes that occurred before 2017, DeShon and Asieh Aziz-Zanjani, the study’s first author and a postdoctoral researcher at Southern Methodist University, looked at seismic activity in the southwestern region of the basin called the Delaware Basin. Since 2009, this region, along with the rest of the Permian Basin, has seen an increase in small earthquakes.

The researchers combined earthquake data from 2009 to 2016 with high-quality TexNet data from 116 earthquakes that occurred in the Delaware Basin after 2020. They used a mathematical tool called subcentral decomposition to help find patterns between the older and newer data. This led them to recalculate the depths of 73 earthquakes before 2017 that measured magnitudes greater than 1.5.

This method helps us show that the earthquakes we see at an altitude of four kilometers [nearly 2.5 miles]They are [move] “Much lower depths correspond to the depths where water is injected,” Aziz Zanjani said.

Mitigation efforts

With earthquakes on the rise in West Texas — the region has been hit by nearly 2,000 quakes in 2021, a record — understanding what triggers a tremor and mitigating its effects is critical, DeShon said.

One mitigation effort has been to halt wastewater injection. For example, in 2021, the Texas Railroad Commission, which oversees the oil and gas industry, halted wastewater injection in Northwest Midland County after earthquakes of magnitudes greater than 3.0 struck the area. In 2023, after a series of earthquakes of magnitudes greater than 5.0, the agency halted wastewater injection permits in the Permian Basin.

When natural gas production in the fossil-fuel-rich Barnett Shale region around Dallas-Fort Worth slowed for economic reasons, there was a decrease in the amount of wastewater being pumped, which led to a decrease in earthquakes over the past decade, DeShon said.

“summit [wastewater] “In the Dallas-Fort Worth area it was 2012, so they were injecting much less wastewater into the deep rock than they used to here in the Fort Worth Basin and we rarely felt the earthquake now,” she said. “You can definitely see that even though it was economically driven and not intentionally done, it’s an example of a mitigation strategy.”

A drilling rig works in the Barnett Shale area in Flower Mound, Texas, on July 19, 2010. (K.R. Lee/Dallas Morning News)

But because the country is so dependent on oil and natural gas, at least for now, it’s not possible to completely stop fracking, and thus wastewater injection. So it’s important to do it responsibly, in reasonable quantities and with a better understanding of the underlying geology of the Earth (such as where fault lines lie), say DeShon and Huang of the University of Texas at Austin and Egonen of the University of Texas at Dallas.

The findings have implications for environmental efforts such as carbon capture and storage, a process in which carbon dioxide emissions are trapped and stored underground, Igonen added.

“If you’re not monitoring in real time and you don’t know where the carbon is going, that’s a problem,” she said. “So, despite everything we’ve learned from the oil and gas industry, many of us are actively trying to implement [it]…to carbon capture projections because we don't want to repeat the same mistakes we made. [the oil and gas] “I made the industry.”

Miriam Fawzia is a science reporting fellow at The Dallas Morning News. Her fellowship is supported by the University of Texas at Dallas. The Dallas Morning News makes all editorial decisions.

Correction, August 20, 2023 at 3:01 p.m.: This story has been updated to correct the spelling of Nadine Egonin's name.

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