Yeah, but the city fathers smell money and the population smells lawsuit. More about something for nothing. I guess now they want to send back the lease bonuses and the royalty checks for all that nasty gas production they have benefited from.
Point made and point taken ...well stimulation goes lateral and not down ...no impact on rocks 10,000 feet deeper. If they don’t believe that they won’t believe anything else so forget it.
Put me on that jury.
First of all, these earthquakes are no stronger than the effects you feel from a passing truck. So, it’s pretty hard to claim damages in a lawuit.
That doesn’t mean someone won’t try, but I have news for this reporter. The seismic information we gather shows that earthquakes in Texas, small though they might be, have been occuring for at least two billion years. Is there a fault line under your house? Let me out it this way...
I’ve reviewed many thousands of 2D and 3D seismic lines, and there’s a fault apparent under every single one of them.
Earthquakes happen. Oil drilling does not cause them.
It is far likelier that these nuisance earthquakes (and they are very minor) may be related to the weight of oil and gas suddenly being removed from above them.
However, if this was the case then other shale formations around the world would experience similar shakings as they are drilled.
The closest that I can remember to this subject is the spate of small earthquakes near the Three Gorges dam, thought to be caused by the weight of the lake on underlying strata.
Has anyone heard of similar earthquakes near oil and gas fields?
Web searches find hundreds of links to the same story from Cleburne, lots of stories about the mud lake in Indonesia and hundreds of stories on attempts to drill down into an active earthquake fault. It is these same stories over and over again.