Quote:
Originally Posted by Robbie
Good lord, Mark...your ignorance knows no bounds. NO, it's not man-made. Unreal that you think that humans can actually cause earthquakes.
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How Oil and Gas Disposal Wells Can Cause Earthquakes
http://stateimpact.npr.org/texas/tag/earthquake/
The culprit of earthquakes near fracking sites is not believed to be the act of drilling and fracturing the shale itself, but rather the disposal wells. Disposal wells are the final resting place for used drilling fluid. These waste wells are located thousands of feet underground, encased in layers of concrete. They usually store the waste from several different wells.There are more than 50,000 disposal wells in Texas servicing more than 216,000 active drilling wells, according the the Railroad Commission. Each well uses about 4.5 million gallons of chemical-laced water, according to hydrolicfracturing.com.
?The model I use is called the air hockey table model,? says Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas at Austin. ?You have an air hockey table, suppose you tilt it, if there?s no air on, the puck will just sit there. Gravity wants it to move but it doesn?t because there friction [with the table surface].?
But if you turn the air on for the air hockey table, the puck slips.
?Faults are the same,? he says. If you pump water in a fault, the fault can slip, causing an earthquake.
?Scientists in my community know that injection can sometimes cause earthquakes,? Frohlich says.