Drilling might be culprit behind TX EQs

iVillage Member
Registered: 03-23-2003
Drilling might be culprit behind TX EQs
1
Fri, 06-12-2009 - 2:53pm
Drilling might be culprit behind Texas earthquakes

By JEFF CARLTON
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER


CLEBURNE, Texas -- The earth moved here on June 2. It was the first recorded earthquake in this Texas town's 140-year history - but not the last.


There have been four small earthquakes since, none with a magnitude greater than 2.8. The most recent ones came Tuesday night, just as the City Council was meeting in an emergency session to discuss what to do about the ground moving.


The council's solution was to hire a geology consultant to try to answer the question on everyone's mind: Is natural gas drilling - which began in earnest here in 2001 and has brought great prosperity to Cleburne and other towns across North Texas - causing the quakes?


"I think John Q. Public thinks there is a correlation with drilling," Mayor Ted Reynolds said. "We haven't had a quake in recorded history, and all the sudden you drill and there are earthquakes."


At issue is a drilling practice called "fracking," in which water is injected into the ground at high pressure to fracture the layers of shale and release natural gas trapped in the rock.


There is no consensus among scientists about whether the practice is contributing to the quakes. But such seismic activity was once rare in Texas and seems to be increasing lately, lending support to the theory that drilling is having a destabilizing effect.


On May 16, three small quakes shook Bedford, a suburb of Dallas and Fort Worth. Two small earthquakes hit nearby Grand Prairie and Irving on Oct. 31, and again on Nov. 1.


The towns sit upon the Barnett Shale, a geologic formation that is perhaps the nation's richest natural gas field. The area is estimated to have 30 trillion cubic feet of recoverable gas and provides about 7 percent of the country's supply.


REMAINDER OF ARTICLE AT http://www.seattlepi.com/national/1110ap_texas_earthquakes_drilling.html

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iVillage Member
Registered: 03-03-2009
Fri, 06-12-2009 - 2:58pm
Drilling for gas may have created a mud volcano in Indonesia:
"Independent foreign experts have concluded that gas exploration company Lapindo was almost certainly to blame for the disaster but no one has been prosecuted.
Lapindo, which is connected to powerful Welfare Minister Aburizal Bakrie, says the eruption was triggered by a distant earthquake."
http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20090529/wl_asia_afp/indonesiaenvironmentmud

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