Scientists suspected that the Arkansas earthquakes were triggered by the injection of approximately 94.5 million gallons of
fracking wastewater into to nearby wells, which then made its way into the basement layer during a nine - month period.
Not exact matches
Since then, we have all learned a lot about the risks of
fracking — about how the toxic chemicals used can migrate
into drinking water, about how methane can leak out of well casements, about the danger of disposing of billions of gallons of polluted
wastewater the process produces.
Over half of the
wastewater from
fracking, rough 2 - 6 million gallons, is often released back
into the main supply with minimal treatment due to ineffectiveness of facilities to detect, let alone properly treat.
In 2011, in response to growing public concern about the possible environmental and human health effects of
fracking wastewater, Pennsylvania's Department of Environmental Protection requested that the discharge of
fracking fluids and other unconventional oil and gas
wastewater into surface waters be prohibited from central water - treatment facilities that release high salinity effluents.
A study published today in Science explains how
wastewater injection sites — areas where toxic water left over from oil drilling and
fracking processes is injected
into the ground between impermeable layers of rocks to avoid polluting freshwater — could be driving the sharp increase in the sometimes - disastrous earthquake events.
Investigations by The New York Times last winter revealed that sewage - treatment plants processing
fracking wastewater are discharging radioactive fluid
into public waterways, in some cases upstream of intake sites for drinking water.
But according to a panel of geologists at the AAAS Annual Meeting, the culprit isn't hydraulic fracturing, or «
fracking,» in which geologists crack open subsurface rocks to extract oil and gas; instead, it's the processes associated with pumping
wastewater and other fluids back
into the ground.
Although it has long been known that the injection of
wastewater into disposal wells can trigger earthquakes by increasing pore pressure and destabilizing fault lines, rarely has
fracking itself been identified as the source of tremors.
Instead, the increased risk for seismicity is more strongly linked with the subsequent injection of the
wastewater from
fracking and other oil - extraction processes
into massive disposal wells that are thousands of feet underground.
The study found no evidence of contamination from chemical - laden
fracking fluids, which are injected
into gas wells to help break up shale deposits, or from «produced water,»
wastewater that is extracted back out of the wells after the shale has been fractured....
Trump's EPA would allow
wastewater from oil and gas wells, including
fracked wells, to make its way
into US rivers, streams, lakes and reservoirs after some treatment.
The more oil companies
frack and drill, the more
wastewater they inject
into disposal wells near active faults, which can trigger damaging earthquakes.
It was only after deep injection disposal wells used to house
fracking's toxic
wastewater went
into operation that the earthquakes started.
This included
fracking wastewater that state officials had allowed to be dumped at local sewer plants — facilities incapable of removing the complex mix of chemicals, corrosive salts, and radioactive materials from that kind of industrial waste before they piped the «treated» water back
into Pennsylvania's rivers.
The suspected culprit is
fracking — or more specific to this case, the three injection wells in the area, which inject «vast volumes of salty, chemical - laced
wastewater» deep
into the ground.