A correlation study on earthquakes, fracking and waste-water injection.
That doesn’t mean that a lot of wells cause earthquakes. Eaton calculates that about 0.3 per cent of fracked wells create problems.
But there are enough wells drilled for even that tiny fraction to be a concern.
This study, of course, will soon be cited by the same people that say a six percent Muslim population is perfectly safe.
Hydro dams cause earthquakes all the time. No big flap about that. Oh…..and hydro dams are also an enormous contributor to methane emissions because of bacteria living in oxygen-starved environments. It has been estimated that all large reservoirs globally could emit up to 104 teragrams of methane annually. NASA that global methane emissions associated with burning fossil fuels totals between 80 and 120 teragrams annually.
The environmentalists should be up in arms about Quebec’s James Bay Project.
Didn’t a muslim “scholar” opine that earhtquakes are caused by scantily-clad women (i.e.; women so shameles you can actually see any bare flesh of them in public)?! This must be related…
What’s happening in Europe and Scandinavia should be a warning to North America.
=This is What Happens to Countries that Muslims Occupy =
As long as the Muslim population remains around or under 2% in any given country, they will be for the most part be regarded as a “peace-loving minority”, and not as a threat to other citizens. This is the case in:
United States — Muslim 0.6%
Australia — Muslim 1.5%
Canada — Muslim 1.9%
China — Muslim 1.8%
Italy — Muslim 1.5%
Norway — Muslim 1.8%
At 2% to 5%, they begin to proselytize from other ethnic minorities and disaffected groups, often with major recruiting from the jails and among street gangs. This is happening in:
Denmark — Muslim 2%
Germany — Muslim 3.7%
United Kingdom — Muslim 2.7%
Spain — Muslim 4%
Thailand — Muslim 4.6%
From 5% on, they exercise an inordinate influence in proportion to their percentage of the population. For example, they will push for the introduction of halal (clean by Islamic standards) food, thereby securing food preparation jobs for Muslims. They will increase pressure on supermarket chains to feature halal on their shelves — along with threats for failure to comply. This is occurring in:
France — Muslim 8%
Philippines — 5%
Sweden — Muslim 5%
Switzerland — Muslim 4.3%
The Netherlands — Muslim 5.5%
Trinidad & Tobago — Muslim 5.8%
At this point, they will work to get the ruling government to allow them to rule themselves (within their ghettos) under Sharia, the Islamic Law. The ultimate goal of Islamists is to establish Sharia law over the entire world.
Sweden shows what becomes common at 5% muslim occupation, and how political correctness ignores it and buries the stories.
“Muslim Rape Epidemic in Sweden and Norway — Authorities Look the Other Way.”
http://fjordman.blogspot.dk/2005/02/muslim-rape-epidemic-in-sweden-and.html
Sweden: A New Hell for Women
http://www.d-intl.com/2013/10/15/sweden-a-new-hell-for-women/?lang=en
When Muslims approach 10% of the population, they tend to increase lawlessness as a means of complaint about their conditions. In Paris, we’ve seen car-burnings, riots, and now terrorist attacks.
As a group they simply cannot be trusted. They won’t integrate and will always want special treatment. We already have a large group of first immigrants who do that. We don’t need any more.
0.3% is it? And what is the error bar, pray tell?
This study will of course go ignored by the far right, while simultaneously saying that a 6% Muslim population is something to worry about. You see what I did there, Lance?
“wells drilled between 1985 and 2015”
That is a such a small timeframe considering how old the earth is that it is meaningless, similar to defining your entire life by what happened in the past hour.
Trucks and trains cause measurable earthquakes. Those guys are morons.
No link in Huffo Pooh to the actual paper. I gave up when I read “complex statistical analysis” and “0.3% of the fracked wells create problems”. With over 12,000 wells studied, that means only a maximum of 36 fracked wells over a 30 year time period could be a problem – about 1 well per year. Dave Eaton, if you’re out there, you have turned into a moron. I hope you are not a professional geoscientist (P.Geo.) because these people have a duty to the public. To tell the truth and stuff.
The follow up Science to Hillary’s stump statement of late…..What a worthless cluster of idiots
BTW: The issue with Muslins immigration needs to be analyzed with the qualifier “WHY” Is it a male payback to Western radical feminism? Is it a guilty response to past injustice? Is it just a stupid reflex to a learned fallacy….Is it preordained destiny that can’t be stopped?
The why must be asked & answered of every endeavor…It is a Mystery otherwise.
The tone of the article and its attempts to bamboozle with numbers which, as has been pointed out, appear unlikely to have come out of (or scientifically support) any serious study, suggest that this is more climate change propaganda, designed to add to the body of self-referencing googlegarbage that keeps the climate change Kool-Aid sweet.
Might also point out that earth quakes are geology reliving stress build-up; so IF (bold and underlined) the every-so-minute (on a geological scale) introduction of lubrication by way of water-flood or other oil production enhancement techniques (usually at shallow depths whereas seismic incidents are predominately very, very deep) actually did prompt low-level earthquakes, this is likely a good thing as it is mitigating the potential for this stress to compound into a much larger, potentially devastating event.
This appears to be the project in question, although there is no link to the report quoted here either:
http://www.inducedseismicity.ca/
or it might be this one, although linking to iit crashed my PC with a virus warning:
http://microseismic-research.ca/
and this leads to Dr. Eaton:
http://www.ucalgary.ca/eatond/
http://csegrecorder.com/interviews/view/interview-with-david-eaton
and this to an expanded version of the article quoted above (as usual nowadays, the editing of articles and how they are presented in various venues is more interesting than the article itself), although the photo overlay that accompanies the voice over is more of the same.
http://calgaryherald.com/business/energy/fracking-not-water-disposal-behind-earthquakes-says-new-study
If their minds were any further open their brains would fall out.
The idiocy is endless.
Think about it.
The most awkward aspect of earthquakes is their timing, unpredictability being the issue.
If Fracking causes earthquakes, San Francisco is saved.
By fracking we can trigger relief shocks.
On Sunday at 2pm.
No more waiting for the Big One, for Vancouver,Tokyo,Wellington……
The claimed correlation is similar to the birth of a two headed calf 6 months before the black plague spreads to the monastery.
“It is an omen my Lord”.
Yes … learning is good.
And in the case of this article … I didn’t really “learn” anything till the very LAST line …
“There’s a mixture of science and the whole social-political aspect of this.”
Did they bother to define earthquakes? For example, when we are at our trailer, I sometimes feel the vibration of the freight trains that are over 3 kilometers away. Is that an earthquake? I thought I learned in grade school that the Prairie Indians locate herds of Buffalo by putting their ear to the ground and listening. Were those earthquakes?
Not to mention, 36 out of 12,000. What is the statistical significance of that? Remember, correlation is not necessarily causation.
Hi,
Just a comment on the 0.3% of wells cause problems.
First I am not saying that fracking does not cause earth quakes…or that injection wells same.
HI have been involved in the industry for 40 years in the very intensive industry of CAnada where we drill an incredible # of wells compared to anywhere else in the world except for the US.
The rigs in Canada and the US are equal to the number in the rest of the world, and those rigs drill holes faster than any other area of the world.
I am a CAnadian and have worked in the industry for 40 years and seen an incredible amount of wells drilled and fracced. I doubt the 0.3% number, since I have not experienced or know of an earthquake caused by drilling or injecting into a well.
JAB, thanks for the sleuthing.
Many of the injection wells started their life as producing oil & gas wells including having been fracked. As production declines and/or the oil to water ratio declines (the cut), some producing wells are converted into injection wells so that the salt water collected from the producing wells can be re-injected back into the producing formation to keep up the pressure.
The geometry of a producing oil & gas field may not be suitable for determining whether an injection or production well is the cause of an earthquake. Wells extend to depths of several thousand feet but are separated by only a few thousand feet in a typical oil field. The injection wells would tend to be located near the outer boundary of the oil pool but can be interspersed.
The error in the position estimate of an earthquake epicenter is likely much higher, on average, than the typical distance between injection and production wells.
It seems very unlikely that the location of an earthquake epicenter could be determined with an accuracy to locate it to a specific well location, hence the need for “complex statistical analysis”.
Add to the above that only 605 earthquakes occurred during the 30 year study period and that gives 20 wells drilled per event. What that tells me is there is virtually no correlation between seismic events and the drilling of oil and gas wells.
Can fracking and water injection cause micro-earthquakes? Probably, but so can the normal pressure release in an oil pool during extraction plus natural causes not related to drilling. Given the high concentration of wells and the sparse distribution of seismometers the proper conclusion of the study should have been “we don’t have the resolution to make such a correlation”.
0.3% isn’t even statistical noise, it’s a statistical whisper.
And let’s get something straight which the so-called ‘study’ doesn’t mention.
Earthquakes are going to happen whether there is fracking or not. If fracking is triggering them, it is doing so earlier than they otherwise would have released. And that is a good thing. Many tiny earthquakes cause no damage; tectonic force which builds up for one massive release is the problem.
The study should have been renamed: “Fracking reduces risk of earthquake damage.”
Trying to link earthquakes to fracking and/or injection wells is further complicated by the depth estimate of the epicentre relative to the fracking / injection depth. How do we know that an injection operation at 12,000 feet caused an earthquake in the same area at a 10 km depth (over 30,000 ft)? How accurate are epicentre depth estimates anyway?
One paper linked to by JAB attempts to establish a link between large global earthquakes and smaller local ones with the former being the trigger to the latter. Why is this not published in the local newspaper? Because it isn’t anti-oil.
Hi Jean, wondering where you got these statistics on Islam from? any link you can share?
thanks LM