Last week a scientific research paper was published in the magazine Science on the topic of earthquakes related to injection wells. The paper is the result of a series of workshops by the U.S. Geological Survey. Although we don’t have a copy of the full paper, we do have a summary. A summary of the summary is this: fracking shale results in a lot of fluid that gets disposed of via Class II injection wells. Some of those wells are near faults and result in tremors–most of the time unfelt. There is, in the opinion of the USGS scientists, a direct connection between the increase in fluid injection from shale drilling and the rise (and clusters) of low-level earthquakes. The good news? There are strategies for “mitigating the effects of human-induced earthquakes caused by wastewater injection” which are discussed in the paper…
