A slew of lawsuits filed in Oklahoma last week accuse more than a dozen oil and gas companies of triggering earthquakes through hydraulic fracturing, or fracking.
Environmentalist website Inside Climate News reported Wednesday the lawsuits are in response to over one hundred magnitude 2.5 earthquakes which “caused property damage, knocked out the local power supply, and [shook] people’s faith in the state government’s ability to control the situation.” The first two lawsuits were filed by locals, but environmental groups are preparing to file several more.
The Sierra Club is also set to file a lawsuit in Oklahoma against oil companies for allegedly causing earthquakes. The environmental group has vehemently opposed fracking and claims the well-stimulation technique “is known to contaminate drinking water, pollute the air, and cause earthquakes.”
The Sierra Club lawsuit alleges oil companies “have injured or threatened to injure, and will continue to injure or threaten to injure, the health, environmental, aesthetic, and economic interests” of Oklahoma citizens. But so far, there’s never been an injury or death linked to an earthquake supposedly caused by fracking — such quakes are much too weak to even be felt. Environmentalists want fracking to be labeled as an “ultrahazardous activity,” meaning that oil and gas companies would be liable for damages even if they weren’t being negligent.
Another one of the lawsuits, filed by local residents, claims the oil and gas industry “knew or should have known” fracking triggered earthquakes. They claim companies pushed ahead “with reckless disregard for the consequences to others.” The suit specifically lists several Oklahoma earthquakes with magnitudes greater than 4.0 as caused by fracking.
The recent rash of earthquakes in Oklahoma has spurred calls by environmentalists and progressives to ban fracking across the state. News outlets, such as Bloomberg News, have even claimed that the small quakes are a threat to national security.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) states such small quakes are so weak they are “not felt except by a very few under especially favorable conditions.”
The quakes in question were not linked to fracking, according to the USGS. The government’s experts say “[h]ydraulic fracturing, commonly known as ‘fracking’, does not appear to be linked to the increased rate of magnitude 3 and larger earthquakes.”
Earthquakes are measured on a logarithmic scale, and the difference between whole numbers on the scale is massive. An earthquake that measures 3.0 on the Richter scale releases about 31 more times energy than a 2.0 quake and has a shaking amplitude 10 times larger.
Waste-water disposal, an industrial process used to safely dispose of water used for fracking or in other parts of the oil industry, can cause minor earthquakes.
However, the kind of earthquake that waste-water disposal could potentially cause releases hundreds of times less energy than the kind of earthquakes that can do any damage. Additionally, well under 1 percent of wastewater injection wells are linked to earthquakes of any kind.
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