Thousands of earthquakes, associated with fracturing, continue to shake the dam area at site C.

Construction of the Site C dam in northeast British Columbia proved more difficult than officials expected due to unstable land on the north bank. Add to the fears: countless earthquakes.

For nearly a decade, The Tyee reported a high number of earthquakes caused by hydraulic fracturing of shale formations in the region. Now, new studies indicate that the number of these tremors in recent years has reached several thousand, raising more concerns about the future of the mega-project.

The researchers warn that the shaking could become strong enough to collapse vital infrastructure such as roads, high-rise buildings and dams.

Regulatory practices in British Columbia attempt to limit hydraulic fracturing operations after small earthquakes. But this “is not sufficient to protect critical or weak infrastructure that has unacceptable failure consequences,” seismic risk expert Jill Atkinson noted in the May 7 issue of Nature Reviews.

No one can yet predict fault-induced earthquakes before they occur, and “risk prediction” remains an “important area of ​​research”.

Another study, published this week by researcher Ben Parfit at the Canadian Center for Policy Alternatives, took data from federal earthquake catalogs to show the number of jolts the hydraulic fracturing industry is producing near the site C.

The numbers are staggering. Between 2017 and 2018 alone, the industry caused 6,551 earthquakes greater than 0.8 magnitude in the region near the mega-turbulent project with a price estimate of $ 12 billion and increasing.

For example, drilling by Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. In a 4.6-magnitude earthquake in November 2018 that forced evacuation of the Site C dam site followed by events of magnitude 3.5 and 4 after fracturing stopped.

Those earthquakes, which shook buildings at Fort St. John, forced engineers to reassess the safety of levees in an area whose seismic risks have changed dramatically due to widespread cracking.

Parfit took recent data and asked David Leversey, an experienced mapmaker, to create a map showing how close the fracture is to blocking Site C.

“The map shows that much of the area south of the Site C dam is filled with faults in rocky rocks as fossil fuel companies have pumped hundreds of millions of liters of water into the ground,” Parfit concludes.

Two years of bumping. The map shows fracturing-related seismic clusters near the Site C project in 2017 and 2018. Map compiled by David Leversee with data collected by Ben Parfitt.

Anthony Engrafa is a Cornell University expert in hydraulic fracturing – injecting fluids deep into the earth to fracture rocks and releasing oil and gas for drilling. He told The Tyee that BC Hydro was “playing with fire” by building in a region that is seismically active by fracturing.

“Lubrication and pressure changes – the result of both crushing and waste injection – can activate long idle fault systems. If one has to have accurate estimates of these defect areas and stress changes, one can estimate the largest possible volume, and this is the main issue,” said Engra. Especially with regard to the safety of dams.

He hopes that geologists “are now trying to make this estimate.”

For years, BC Hydro and the Provincial Oil and Gas Commission have been reluctant to talk about the risks from fracturing earthquakes in dam infrastructure throughout Northeast British Columbia.

But in January, a Freedom of Information request from Parfit found a flurry of correspondence that demonstrated that officials had been concerned about the dangers fracturing and disposing of sewage pose in the area for more than a decade.

BC Hydro officials have warned several people in the county government including top bureaucrats and anonymous ministers that “fracturing near its dams can have dire consequences, including the worst possible outcome – a complete failure of the dam,” Parfit revealed earlier in This year.

He shared the documents with The Tyee, which published an extensive chronology about the science and the government’s reluctant response to the rising rates of earthquakes in the Montney region.

Throughout the Monteny Rock Formation (top) fracking is associated with thousands of earthquakes, including near the C site dam project. The diagram (below) from the Gail Atkinson study published by Nature Reviews illustrates how fracking can create “direct and indirect paths.” … to critically stressed fault lines, which leads to tremors. Diagram adapted from Cambridge University Press.

Another recent study by McGill University researchers using a different set of data collected in the same area recorded nearly 5,000 earthquakes in an area of ​​about 60 x 70 kilometers, southeast of the Site C dam, between July 2017 and April 2019.

Industry-induced earthquakes ranged in degrees from 0.5 to 4.5 throughout the entire study period in the Dawson-Septimus region.

The researchers wrote that Montney Formation “hosted the largest [hydraulic fracturing] Caused by earthquakes in Canada so far. “

They suggested that widespread fracturing increased pore pressure in the rocky rocks that lay beyond the area and its three dams.

The researchers said the increased stress from fracturing associated with existing faults and destabilization of the large shale area, leading to 38 distinct swarms of earthquakes.

Meanwhile, Atkinson’s study in Nature Reviews and another paper she co-wrote with colleague Hady Al-Ghafrani conveys what scientists have now learned about hydraulic fracturing in the region. The results include:

Industry-generated earthquakes have increased in conjunction with the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing in horizontal wells in western Canada since 2009. The earthquake rate directly corresponds to the increase in hydraulic fracturing. The incidence of earthquakes due to fracturing varies widely across western Canada, but is most pronounced in the formation of shale gas at Montney in northeastern British Columbia as reported by The Tyee nearly a decade ago. Industry-made earthquakes in shale formations are chaotic because researchers cannot predict where the faults will be or how they will behave. Hydraulic fracturing can lead to seismic activity hundreds of meters above the area being fractured or target formation within one to two kilometers. Earthquakes can also occur days or years after the shale area is fractured. No geological formation is immune to earthquakes from fracturing, but some formations, such as Montney, appear to be more vulnerable than others. Large injection volumes may affect a larger area and thus increase the likelihood of stress disturbances to reach high stress faults. The number of fractured wells in western Canada that cause earthquakes greater than 3.0 falls between one in 100 and one in 200. The correlation rate appears to be slowly rising over time. The researchers write: “Although susceptibility is widely variable, we have no reason to believe that any formations are immune to the possibility of induced earthquakes.” The risk of earthquakes caused by fracturing can have severe consequences for the seismic safety of nearby infrastructure only 10 kilometers away. As in China, hydraulic fracturing can trigger earthquakes large enough to demolish buildings and cause landslides – amounts generally exceeding 4.0. It is not possible to predict with confidence whether a particular cracking process will cause earthquakes before starting. Current ‘risk mitigation strategies’, such as stopping rupture after earthquakes, ‘have yet to prove their reliability.’

The potential threat posed by fracking earthquakes does not only apply to the Site C project and other dams in Northern British Columbia. And drainage and strength.

Teaser image source: By Jeffrey Wynne – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid = 60769403

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