![]() ![]() Private property laws are exceptionally strong in the state natural gas and oil are often privately owned. “The thing we face as an agency under Oklahoma law is that we have to be able to show that what we’re doing in not arbitrary or capricious and is not considered a taking of private property,” Skinner told Yahoo News. Matt Skinner, a spokesman for the division, says the group’s number one mandate is water protection and that given the current state of affairs its top concern is seismicity. The Oil and Gas Conservation Division of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission (OCC) is the governing body that regulates the state’s oil and gas companies. A team of scientists have determined that a 5.6 magnitude quake in Oklahoma in 2011 was caused when oil drilling waste was injected deep underground. Two earthquakes in the area in less than 24 hours caused one of the towers to topple, and damaged the remaining three. Maintenance workers inspect the damage to one of the spires on Benedictine Hall at St. “Water and fault zones are a formula for seismicity,” Andrews said. Most of the earthquakes have occurred within the crystalline basement, on faults within Oklahoma’s tectonic stress regime, according to the OGS. Those wells are providing the little bits of change needed,” Briana Mordick, a staff scientist for the Natural Resources Defense Council, told Yahoo News. It doesn’t take much change to the system to cause those faults to slip. ![]() “There are faults pretty much all across the country. It can take anywhere from weeks to more than a year of this water pouring in before it triggers naturally occurring stresses in the Earth - causing earthquakes. Much of the wastewater, with much higher salinity levels than ocean water, travels many miles away from its injection site and seeps into the underlying crystalline basement such permeability makes it difficult to link a specific well with seismic activity. It will take as much water as you can put into it.” “They don’t need to inject the water under any other pressure. “It is known to have bulk porosity, voids in the rocks that can hold fluids,” Andrews said. Parts of the Arbuckle are highly fractured with expansive systems of cavities and caverns that the energy sector found perfect for dumping wastewater. The majority of the state’s wastewater is deposited in the Arbuckle formations, which are underground reservoirs of dolomite, limestone and other rocks. The seismicity rate in Oklahoma is about 600 times greater than it was before 2008, around the time dewatering started in the state. “The primary suspected source of triggered seismicity is not from hydraulic fracturing but from the injection/disposal of water associated with oil and gas production,” the report from the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS) reads. Andrews and state seismologist Austin Holland say the spike in earthquakes - particularly in central and north-central areas of the state - is “very unlikely to represent a naturally occurring process.” On Tuesday, the Oklahoma Geological Survey (OGS) issued its most strongly worded statement yet linking the oil and gas industry to the state’s earthquakes. Now, as the public absorbs this information, Oklahoma’s regulatory bodies are keeping a watchful eye on these disposal wells and planning their next moves. State scientists say they have uncovered the root cause of the majority of the state’s earthquakes: the oil and gas industry’s disposal of billions of barrels of water underground. The onslaught of seismic activity in Oklahoma in recent years has captured the attention of the nation. Drilling rigs dot the landscape in northern Oklahoma on Nov.17, 2013. ![]()
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