Oklahoma Concedes Role of Drilling and Fracking in Earthquakes

Earthquake damaged home - failed GOP policies at work

Despite what the American Petroleum Institute sponsored ads would lead you to believe - they typically start by blathering about the USA being the world's new top producer - fracking and secondary/tertiary disposal wells are dangerous and have very negative downsides: polluting the ground water and triggering earthquakes.  This is no new surprise to those in the oil industry as I once was some 30+ years ago.  Not that such matters are concerns for oil and gas companies based in distant cities.  For them and folks like the Koch brothers, it is ALL about making a buck off of increased oil and gas production. Now, the state of Oklahoma  has belatedly conceded that disposal wells and fracking are causing dire side effects.  Here are highlights from a piece in the New York Times:

Abandoning years of official skepticism, Oklahoma’s government on Tuesday embraced a scientific consensus that earthquakes rocking the state are largely caused by the underground disposal of billions of barrels of wastewater from oil and gas wells.

The state’s energy and environment cabinet introduced a website detailing the evidence behind that conclusion Tuesday, including links to expert studies of Oklahoma’s quakes. The site includes an interactive map that plots not only earthquake locations, but also the sites of more than 3,000 active wastewater-injection wells.

The website coincided with a statement by the state-run Oklahoma Geological Survey that it “considers it very likely” that wastewater wells are causing the majority of the state’s earthquakes.

The statement and the website’s acknowledgment amount to a turnabout for a state government that has long played down the connection between earthquakes and an oil and gas industry that is Oklahoma’s economic linchpin.

As recently as last fall, Gov. Mary Fallin, a Republican, indicated that suggestions of a relationship between oil and gas activity and seismicity were speculation, and that more study was needed.

In a news release issued Tuesday, Ms. Fallin called the Geological Survey’s endorsement of that relationship significant, and said the state was dealing with the problem.

Tuesday’s actions met a mixed response from the oil and gas industry and the governor’s critics. The Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association disputed the Geological Survey’s conclusions, saying in a statement that further study of the state’s quakes remained necessary.

One of the most prominent advocates of stronger action on the earthquake issue, State Representative Cory Williams, a Democrat, said he had been pleasantly surprised by the change in what he called the state’s “head in the sand” approach to the quake problem.

But Mr. Williams, from earthquake-rattled Stillwater, criticized officials for failing to announce further steps to actually curtail the tremors.  Separately, he called on Tuesday for the state to halt wastewater disposal in a 16-county section of central and north-central Oklahoma that the Geological Survey has identified as posing the highest seismic risk.

In past decades, Oklahomans experienced only about one and a half earthquakes exceeding magnitude 3.0 in an average year. But since a boom in oil and gas exploration began in the mid-2000s, that number has mushroomed. The state recorded 585 quakes of 3.0 or greater last year, more than any state except Alaska, and is on course to register more than 900 such tremors this year.

Most of the quakes result in little more than cracked plaster and driveways, but residents in quake zones say the cumulative damage — to their property and to their nerves — is far greater.

Larger quakes have also occurred. A series of shocks in 2011 exceeding magnitude 5.0 caused millions of dollars in damage. Some seismologists have warned that the state is risking larger and more damaging quakes unless it acts to reduce the number of tremors.

The GOP's typical approach to such scientific conclusions?  Ignore them and move forward full speed ahead until the  damage and the evidence becomes too great to ignore.  Meanwhile, countless Americans suffer otherwise avoidable harm.