# of Youngstown Earthquakes go from 2 to 11 – Fracking to Blame?
Two days ago MDN told you about a pair of earthquakes near Youngstown, OH (see 2 New Earthquakes Near Youngstown, OH – Fracking Connection?). That number has now grown. So far there have been a total of 11 measurable earthquakes ranging from 1.2 (not felt by humans) to 3.0 (barely felt by some humans). We suspect most people around Mahoning County didn’t feel anything, but that doesn’t stop mass hysteria when it’s announced that there have been a series of earthquakes and the only thing (supposedly) going on in the area is drilling and fracking.
As we previously pointed out, we are aware of one instance–in England–where fracking over an active fault caused an earthquake. So it can happen. But that’s one time out of 60,000+ horizontally, hydraulically fractured shale wells worldwide (maybe more than that now). Statistically it’s zero. We need to keep perspective in this situation. Initially the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) said there are no active Class II injection wells in the area pumping waste fluids deep below the surface for disposal, and so the well being drilled and fracked by Hilcorp near the epicenter of the quake looks like the prime candidate as the cause. But one news story we’ve read (below) seems to cast doubt. There may be injection wells, which also have been known to cause earthquakes when injecting near a fault, operating in the area…
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It is the end of an ignominious era. Carol Collier, whose own anti-drilling views have stopped any forward progress on potential Marcellus Shale drilling in the Delaware River Basin, will tomorrow leave the Delaware River Basin Commission (DRBC) that she has headed for 15 years. Last September when she announced she would retire this March, we predicted her platitudes about finalizing draft shale drilling plans would go nowhere. We were right (see 
A newly published peer reviewed study in the February Bulletin of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) offers new research that we believe comes close to, if not fully, exonerating Cabot Oil & Gas over the now infamous case of methane migration into water wells in a small area of Dimock, PA. The new study has no connection to Cabot. It is written by three experts and uses (gasp) actual science–you know, in the field data? The data comes from “more than 2,300 gas and water samples collected from 234 gas wells and 67 private groundwater-supply wells” in northeastern PA and is the largest such data set ever analyzed. What did the authors find? Shallow (near the surface) methane with the same identical chemical “fingerprint” as deeper Marcellus Shale gas is naturally occurring in large quantities in northeastern PA. That is, the shallow methane under the microscope looks exactly like the methane found more than a mile below the ground, but it isn’t gas from the Marcellus because the methane near the surface that looks just like Marcellus gas, with the same chemical “fingerprint,” was lurking in water wells long before there was any shale drilling in the area.