“You get used to it. The walls are shaking,” says Sam, a resident of Midland, a city in western Texas where hydraulic fracturing to extract oil and gas, a technique known as “fracking”, causes more and more earthquakes.
“A second later there is another tremor, as if a truck passed by,” said the 44-year-old, who did not want to reveal his last name.
Three earthquakes shook the ground on February 4.
This region of the Permian Basin, from which 40% of US oil and 15% of its gas is extracted, registered nine telluric movements of magnitude greater than three in 2019, 51 in 2020 and 176 in 2021, according to the market intelligence firm Sourcenergy.
What causes the earthquakes It is not fracking itself, but the injection of wastewater into wells. The Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates oil activities, had to impose new rules on water disposal.
“Let the fox guard the chicken coop”
Drilling companies must deal with huge amounts of water that arise during fracking and that constitutes about 80% of the fluids extracted from the ground.
Nearly 4,000 wells have been drilled specifically to collect wastewater in the Permian Basin.
“As more and more water is pumped into the ground … these spaces are filled,” said Joshua Adler, chief executive of Sourcenergy, which helps oil companies improve water management.
“In some of those spaces, there are cracks or geological faults. You push harder and harder and maybe you hit that fault, which can cause a slide and that’s an earthquake.”
Since 2012, daily oil production has increased fivefold in the Permian Basin. Therefore, the injections of water in the wells also multiplied.
“In Oklahoma, they basically took years and denied that there was any problem” when earthquakes increased in the 2010s, Adler said.
But in Texas, as soon as the earthquakes began to increase, the Railroad Commission began to study the issue and “did not wait for it to become a giant problem,” he added.
Between September and January, it established three geographic areas at risk.
In Gardendale, the most populous, where the cities of Midland and Odessa are located, it ordered in mid-December to suspend deep water injections in seven wells.
After another four earthquakes with magnitudes between 3.1 and 3.7, he extended the measurement to another 26 wells.
The regulator awaits industry proposals in the other two identified areas, Stanton and Northern Culberson-Reeves.
But Neta Rhyne, 72, who lives near Northern Culberson-Reeves, thinks “it’s like asking the fox to guard the chicken coop.”
“Smells like money”
Last week, Rhyne again requested a hearing from the Railroad Commission, as he has done since 2016, in the face of new requests to drill water disposal wells in his region, fearing that an earthquake will end up affecting one of the largest natural pools in the region. largest in the world fed by surging springs, very close to his home in Balmorhea Nature Park, Toyahvale.
The Texas Parks Department declined to answer AFP questions, but press officer Stephanie Salinas Garcia acknowledged “the concern that earthquakes could affect the upwelling system.”
“There are small communities here. People don’t want to cause trouble, they don’t want to voice their concerns,” said Rhyne, who owns a dive shop near Balmorhea Natural Pool.
A suspension of water injection would imply high costs for the oil companies, which will have to transport the water off the site through pipelines or even by tanker trucks.
Sam, the Midland resident, says that earthquakes generate mixed reactions among people.
“Old people complain a little about earthquakes. But the young never! Three quarters live off oil. Even when there is the smell of hydrogen sulfide being emitted from the wells, they say it smells like money,” she stated.
Source: Gestion
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