For her part, Mrs Von Kaufmann said she was "not totally anti-oil," but added: "I just feel the Weald is not the place for it. In the past year, hairline cracks have appeared in her Victorian home and she fears earthquakes will continue and increase in magnitude.
Prof Haszeldine, who describes himself as "wearing two hats" - one of which is as the director of a research group promoting climate-change solutions - accepts that he might be "subject to unconscious bias".
He does, however, question the neutrality of the regulator. Established in , the OGA's founding principle is to "maximise the economic recovery from UK oil and gas". Prof Haszeldine said it was a "big weakness" that left the OGA "conflicted all the time because its job is to produce more oil". The OGA said its focus on "maximising economic recovery" only applied to offshore oil exploration, adding that it also "has a role in evaluating any effects of petrochemical exploration and production along with other regulators".
After hearing of Prof Haszeldine's theory, Reigate MP Crispin Blunt wrote to Environment Secretary Michael Gove last month calling for an independent inquiry to "investigate categorically whether or not there is a causal connection". She said that she did not believe an inquiry was "currently necessary". Mr Blunt said he was focused on establishing "what level earthquakes would need to reach before one starts worrying about it".
Dr Hicks sympathises with residents looking for answers in the wake of what were "pretty shocking events to those who felt them".
Humans naturally look for "coincidences and correlations" and have long sought meaning in the mysterious movements beneath their feet, he said. He said the Surrey swarm earthquakes were "probably natural events, just due to natural tectonic stresses".
As to fears they will continue, he said: "The most likely scenario is they will just decay and die off, but then we said that back in the autumn of last year. Surrey earthquake 'shakes houses'. Surrey hit by another earthquake. More quakes measured by new equipment. Another earthquake in 'Surrey swarm'. New stations to record earthquakes.
Second earthquake in a week near airport. Drilling began at Horse Hill in September Climate protesters locked themselves together outside the oil well in October Scientific opinion, however, remains divided. Ellsworth, and Sara L. Year Published: Was the Mw 7. Hough, Susan E. Hough, S. Tsai, R. Walker, and F. Aminzadeh Was the Mw7. Page Potentially induced earthquakes during the early twentieth century in the Los Angeles Basin, Bull.
Year Published: Myths and facts on wastewater injection, hydraulic fracturing, enhanced oil recovery, and induced seismicity The central United States has undergone a dramatic increase in seismicity over the past 6 years Fig. Year Published: Shaking from injection-induced earthquakes in the central and eastern United States In this study I consider the ground motions generated by 11 moderate Mw4.
Keranen, Katie M. Potentially induced earthquakes in Oklahoma, USA: links between wastewater injection and the Mw 5. Date published: October 24, Date published: May 9, Date published: March 28, Date published: October 26, Date published: February 19, Attribution: Natural Hazards. Date published: March 6, Filter Total Items: 8. List Grid. May 31, Oil and gas operations are "inducing" these earthquakes. The earthquake rate has dropped by more than 50 percent due to changes in industry.
February 24, February 23, March 14, News section. The value and use of Comprehensive Gas Chromatograph The use of Mass Spectroscopy in Petrochemical analysis Nov 02 Methods and techniques to recycle plastics, industry Hydrostatic test kits offer a more accurate and simp Petrochemical instrument and method developments Nov 01 Improved infrared gas detector bring cost effective You will be poisoned long before you might blow up Oct 19 The value and use of Comprehensive Gas Chromatography in petrochemical analysis.
The use of Mass Spectroscopy in Petrochemical analysis. Request information. The statement, signed by Keller and Oklahoma's state seismologist at the time, Austin Holland, pointed to evidence of historical natural earthquakes in the area. Keranen was surprised by the response but now thinks her reaction was naive. She says she also received pushback from administrators at her university who were not convinced that a link between disposal wells and quakes could be demonstrated.
A few months after Keranen's paper came out, Texas started shaking again. This time quakes struck two rural towns northwest of Fort Worth—Azle and Reno, in one of the densest areas of oil and gas development.
By this time S. Heather DeShon, a seismologist, deployed seismic stations and began mapping faults underneath the towns. Hornbach, along with Stanford's Ellsworth, began studying lake, river and aquifer levels to see if North Texas's drought could have altered stresses on faults. The team also collected data on nearby saltwater-disposal wells and built a 3-D model to simulate pressure from injection wells and estimate how it would move through underground rock.
Their conclusion: wastewater injection from two nearby wells was the most likely cause of the earthquakes. Even before the study was published in April , state regulators began questioning its findings. After I sent an embargoed version of the S. The RRC its name is a historical artifact is overseen by three commissioners. One received campaign contributions from an oil-company political-action committee, and the two others received contributions from the CEO of EnerVest, one of the two operators implicated in the S.
The RRC did eventually summon both well operators to full-day hearings in Austin to demonstrate why their wells should not be shut down. By September , when the commission issued its ruling, the volumes of wastewater being injected in the vicinity of the earthquakes had been reduced, the earthquakes had died down and the well operators were officially allowed to continue business as usual.
Other states have reacted differently. After a series of tremors disturbed the residents of Youngstown, Ohio, in , the state shut down nearby injection wells and installed additional seismic stations to detect earthquakes too tiny to be felt. It established new rules dictating that a quake as small as magnitude 2. Ohio's earthquakes peaked at 11 in before decreasing to four in , according to USGS data. Kansas also responded relatively quickly. Tremors were shaking south-central Kansas near the state's border with Oklahoma.
This was not a surprise, because more than earthquakes had visited Kansas during that year, up from an average of one every two years. But the tremors were growing stronger and soon reached magnitude 4. Kansas governor Sam Brownback convened an induced-seismicity task force to evaluate the quakes. The task force, chaired by Buchanan, recommended restricting injection volumes within five seismic zones across two counties. How were Kansas officials able to reach a consensus? It's pretty hard to come to any other conclusion.
So far the measures Kansas took seem to have had an impact. The reduced activity is at least partly related to the currently low price of oil, which has prompted some operators to drill less and therefore to produce less wastewater.
Engineers who set building codes and officers at insurance companies need to know where the next induced earthquakes will strike and how big they will be. To find out, geologists at the USGS's Earthquake Hazards Program are analyzing the rates of the induced quakes that have been multiplying across the U. USGS scientists have found that ground movements from induced quakes are stronger just above the epicenter but less so away from the immediate area, possibly because they tend to be shallower than natural ones.
Because the uppermost layers of the earth's crust east of the Rocky Mountains are denser than those in California, however, they transmit energy efficiently, and induced quakes can still be felt at great distances.
Next, the group had to come up with a maximum magnitude for these temblors: How strong could they get? After comparing central U. Because scientists have evidence in the prehistoric record of quakes that large in the Texas-Oklahoma region, the USGS's new maps include a low-probability chance for that possibility. Finally, the geologists had to work out the time period over which to make a reasonable earthquake forecast.
They settled on a one-year forecast based on the previous year's earthquake rate and put that information in a series of maps. The computer models used to generate the maps also estimate where, how often and how strongly ground shaking from an earthquake could occur, so that residents, engineers and city planners can see the likelihood that their community will experience a damaging earthquake over the next year.
To many Oklahomans, it is clear that that risk has risen sharply. Data back up their experiences. The earthquake rate in the state has grown at an astounding pace. In the state recorded quakes of magnitude 3 and greater.
The following year the number jumped to , and in it reached Seismologists stated that Oklahoma had a significantly increased chance of seeing a damaging magnitude 5. Scientists such as Keranen and Mark Zoback, a geophysicist at Stanford, are producing even more detailed analyses of why quakes happen so frequently in some places but less—or not at all—in others.
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