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Providing coverage of Alaska and northern Canada's oil and gas industry
September 2015

Vol. 20, No. 36 Week of September 06, 2015

Fracking causes a rumble

Strongest earthquakes on record linked to hydraulic fracturing operations by Progress Energy in northeastern British Columbia

GARY PARK

For Petroleum News

The British Columbia Oil and Gas Commission has injected some of the most authoritative backing yet to the spreading debate in Western Canada, Texas and Oklahoma that activities associated with hydraulic fracturing are triggering earthquakes.

The commission has raised the bar for energy regulators by unequivocally linking a 4.4-magnitude quake in northeastern British Columbia last year to gas exploration by Progress Energy, which is wholly owned by Malaysia’s Petronas, the operator of the Pacific NorthWest LNG project.

The government agency confirmed to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. that the 4.4 quake and an earlier 3.8 quake in the Fort St. John-Fort Nelson area were “triggered by fluid injection during hydraulic fracturing.”

Both were listed among the largest on record that experts believe were induced by the fracking process and both were strong enough to force a temporary shutdown of operations until Progress implements measures to reduce seismic activity or eliminate the well operations causing the quakes.

The commission said the Progress operations, designed to establish gas reserves to back the LNG venture, were “associated with triggering this (4.4-magnitude) event.”

Before the commission’s disclosure Progress had temporarily shut down another fracking site after a 4.6-magnitude quake occurred in the same vicinity, even though the company said it would take several weeks to determine whether there was a link.

Earlier this year, the Alberta Energy Regulator reported that fracking likely caused a 4.4-magnitude quake in that province’s west-central town of Fox Creek, in a region that has only recently shown a pattern of quakes.

Scientists are uncertain whether relatively small quakes can trigger larger ones.

Call for more research

David Eaton, a geophysics professor at the University of Calgary, said more research is “urgently needed” and involves a large team of experts assigned to map fault lines near fracking wells to help better predict how large a fracking quake could be.

Just weeks before the Fox Creek quake, the B.C. commission established a definitive tie between fracking and 231 seismic events in a northeast B.C. gas field known as the Montney Trend.

A month after the Fox Creek event, the Alberta regulator introduced new rules for fracking in the gas-rich Duvernay formation, ordering the industry to assess the risk of causing quakes and to prepare plans for a response.

The AER said its directive could be expanded if quakes became a concern in other regions.

Honn Kao, a research scientist with the Geological Survey of Canada, said there is so much fracking taking place in British Columbia and Alberta that it is difficult, if not impossible, to pinpoint which project might have caused a quake, making research vital because of the public safety and economic issues at play.

Since the two British Columbia earthquakes, Progress has been ordered to lower the volume of fracking fluid it uses to dispose of drilling fluids.

Expert: Unlikely to exceed 6.0

John Clague, an earthquake expert at Vancouver’s Simon Fraser University, said it is extremely unlikely that a fracking-related quake would register above 6.0, although 5.0 to 6.0 could result in damage to buildings or property, but for now there is no clear-cut answer.

Matt Horn, the British Columbia regional director for the Pembina Institute, a clean energy think tank, said the quakes are a “warning sign” if the province “goes down the LNG road in a big way.”

As LNG proposals get debates it is important that participants have their “eyes wide open to both the benefits and impacts,” and include the pattern of earthquakes.

Michael Binnion, chief executive officer of Questerre Energy, which is fracking in the Montney Trend, acknowledged fracking is intended to create disturbances underground in order to release gas from shale formations.

“The whole idea is that we are trying to induce a seismic event and it would be a pretty poor frack job that didn’t accomplish that,” he said.

But he said it is reasonable to ask whether the industry is triggering bigger seismic events than intended.

CAPP says quakes rare

Neither British Columbia’s Natural Gas Development Minister Rich Coleman, nor Progress reacted to the commission’s findings.

However, the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers insists that quakes in the Montney range are extremely rare and pose no threat to public safety.

The issue may be the most significant strike yet against hydraulic fracturing, which already faces growing opposition to its use of fresh water and toxic chemicals.

In Texas, experts say it is not so much the act of drilling and fracking shales that contributes to earthquakes so much as the disposal wells, where drilling fluids are dumped.

The technique includes pumping a water and sand mixture far below the surface, past the water table and freshwater aquifers, into dense shale rock and tight rock formations.

Scientists have said the process can cause very slight seismic activity - usually 10,000 to 1 million times lower than a 3.0 quake.

During the actual hydraulic fracturing, the micro-seismic events are generally less than a magnitude minus 2 or minus 3 on the Richter scale.

An English study found that the combination of geological factors needed to create a higher-than-normal seismic event was “extremely rare” and would be limited to about magnitude 3.

USGS: ‘similar to a passing truck’

The U.S. Geological Survey said magnitude 3 quakes match “vibrations similar to a passing truck.”

The waste wells are located thousands of feet below the surface and are encased in layers of concrete.

Texas has an estimated 50,000 such wells servicing more than 216,000 active drilling wells, according to the Texas Railroad Commission.

Each well uses about 4.5 million gallons of chemicals mixed with water.

Cliff Frolich, a scientist at the Institute for Geophysics at the University of Texas, has told reporters that if water is pumped into a fault line that can cause slippage, triggering an earthquake.

A University of Texas study last year linked the fracking process to quakes in the Barnett Shale in Texas, while researchers at the U.S. Geological Survey say they discovered years ago that they could turn earthquakes on and off by injecting liquid into the ground.

The debate in Oklahoma has gathered momentum as the number of quakes has climbed from an average of two a year over 3.0 magnitude in the 1975-2008 period to 538 in 2014, spurred on by oil and gas billionaire Harold Hamm, who is known as the father of the U.S. fracking boom through his Continental Resources.

State seismologist Austin Holland said Hamm expressed his “concern” at a meeting in late 2013 about the growing evidence Holland had been accumulating that quakes were the outcome of the fracking process.

Bloomberg News reported that Hamm urged Holland to “be careful when publicly discussing the possible connection,” with Holland describing the meeting as “just a little bit intimidating.”






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