In the fall of 2011,
students in Katie Keranen’s seismology course at the University of
Oklahoma buried portable seismograph stations around the campus, in
anticipation of a football game between the Sooners and the Texas A.
& M. Aggies. The plan was to see if the students could, by reading
the instruments, detect the rumble of eighty-two thousand fans cheering
for a touchdown. “To see if they can figure out if a signal is a passing
train or a cheering crowd—that’s much more interesting for them than
discussing data in theory,” Keranen, an assistant professor of
geophysics, told me.
But at 2:12 A.M.
on November 5th, the day of the game, people in seventeen states felt
an earthquake of 4.8 magnitude, centered near Prague, Oklahoma, a town
of roughly twenty-five hundred, which is about an hour’s drive from
Norman, where O.U. is situated. The students quickly packed up the
seismographs and headed to Prague, hoping to measure the aftershocks.
“Obviously, this was more worthwhile than a game,” Keranen said.
Outside
homes around Prague and nearby Meeker, Keranen and her students, along
with Austin Holland, the head seismologist of the Oklahoma Geological
Survey, buried their equipment. Portable seismographs look like
mini-kegs, or time capsules, and they need to be placed underground and
on a level. The researchers wanted to install them quickly, since the
ground was still shaking.
Shortly before 11 P.M.,
people in Prague heard what sounded like a jet plane crashing. It was
another earthquake, this time a 5.6, followed, two days later, by a 4.7.
(The earthquake scale is logarithmic, so a 5.0 earthquake shakes the
ground ten times more than a 4.0, and a hundred times more than a 3.0.)
No one was killed, but at least sixteen houses were destroyed and a
spire on the historic Benedictine Hall at St. Gregory’s University, in
nearby Shawnee, collapsed. Very few people had earthquake insurance; the
five million dollars needed for the repairs at St. Gregory’s was raised
through crowdfunding.
The
earthquakes were big news, but the victory of the Sooners—the name comes
from the term for those who broke the rules of the 1889 land run and
staked claims in advance—was followed more closely. Few noticed that
Keranen and her team had gathered likely the best data we have on a new
phenomenon in Oklahoma: man-made earthquakes.
At
the time, earthquakes were a relatively rare event for Oklahomans. Now
they’re reported on daily, like the weather, and generally by the
weatherman. Driving outside Oklahoma City one evening last November, I
ended up stopped in traffic next to an electronic billboard that
displayed, in rotation, an advertisement for one per cent cash back at
the Thunderbird Casino, an advertisement for a Cash N Gold pawnshop, a
three-day weather forecast, and an announcement of a 3.0 earthquake, in
Noble County. Driving by the next evening, I saw that the display was
the same, except that the earthquake was a 3.4, near Pawnee.
Until
2008, Oklahoma experienced an average of one to two earthquakes of 3.0
magnitude or greater each year. (Magnitude-3.0 earthquakes tend to be
felt, while smaller earthquakes may be noticed only by scientific
equipment or by people close to the epicenter.) In 2009, there were
twenty. The next year, there were forty-two. In 2014, there were five
hundred and eighty-five, nearly triple the rate of California. Including
smaller earthquakes in the count, there were more than five thousand.
This year, there has been an average of two earthquakes a day of
magnitude 3.0 or greater.
William
Ellsworth, a research geologist at the United States Geological Survey,
told me, “We can say with virtual certainty that the increased
seismicity in Oklahoma has to do with recent changes in the way that oil
and gas are being produced.” Many of the larger earthquakes are caused
by disposal wells, where the billions of barrels of brackish water
brought up by drilling for oil and gas are pumped back into the ground.
(Hydraulic fracturing, or fracking—in which chemically treated water is
injected into the earth to fracture rocks in order to access oil and gas
reserves—causes smaller earthquakes, almost always less than 3.0.)
Disposal wells trigger earthquakes when they are dug too deep, near or
into basement rock, or when the wells impinge on a fault line. Ellsworth
said, “Scientifically, it’s really quite clear.”
The
first case of earthquakes caused by fluid injection came in the
nineteen-sixties. Engineers at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, a
chemical-weapons manufacturing center near Commerce City, Colorado,
disposed of waste fluids by injecting them down a twelve-thousand-foot
well. More than a thousand earthquakes resulted, several of magnitudes
close to 5.0. “Unintentionally, it was a great experiment,” Justin
Rubinstein, who researches induced seismicity for the U.S.G.S., told me.
In
recent years, other states with oil and gas exploration have also seen
an unusual number of earthquakes. State authorities quickly suspected
that the earthquakes were linked to disposal wells. In Youngstown, Ohio,
in 2011, after dozens of smaller quakes culminated in a 4.0, a nearby
disposal well was shut down, and the earthquakes stopped. Around the
same time, in Arkansas, a series of earthquakes associated with four
disposal wells in the Fayetteville Shale led to a ban on disposal wells
near related faults. Earthquakes were also noted in Colorado, Kansas,
and Texas. There, too, relevant disposal wells were shut down or the
volume of fluid injected was reduced and the earthquakes abated.
But
in Oklahoma, which has had more and stronger earthquakes than the other
states, it was late 2013 before an owner of a disposal well was asked
by the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates oil and gas
exploration, to temporarily reduce its operations—and that was because
the well operator himself contacted the O.C.C. and the O.G.S., asking
them to look into whether his well was causing problems. So far, there
have been only eleven instances in which an owner has, by order, stopped
injecting fluids or repositioned a well that was drilled into basement
rock.
Driving through Oklahoma’s
countryside, you see starlings and cows and nodding donkeys—also known
as pumpjacks—and hundreds of disposal wells, of which there are around
thirty-two hundred in the state. Disposal wells are generally simple
structures: there may be trucks full of water parked nearby, and a
typical wellhead is little more than a tank connected to a pump, with
some knobs and a few meters visible. “You would be underwhelmed by the
technology,” a well-operations engineer told me.
An
area of oil and gas exploration is said to be “played out” when it no
longer yields sufficient profits, and much of Oklahoma was considered to
have been played out in the nineteen-nineties. One problem was the
immense quantity of wastewater that was being brought up along with the
diminishing yield of oil. “In the past, these wells that brought up so
much water were abandoned,” Holland, of the O.G.S., told me. “They
didn’t make economic sense. But then a new strategy came along, which
was, basically, Let’s just pull up a lot of water.” Dewatering
technologies and the rising price of oil made Oklahoma a rich business
proposition again.
Although
disposal wells have been used for decades, the new dewatering process
has led to a dramatic increase in how much water is being disposed of.
(In the state, the water used in the initial stage of fracking accounts
for less than ten per cent of the water pumped down disposal wells.) In
Oklahoma today, an average of about ten barrels of water comes up for
every barrel of oil. Holland said, “We’re talking about billions of
barrels, and it has to go somewhere.” Todd Halihan, a professor of
geology at Oklahoma State University, in Stillwater, told me, “We’re
injecting the equivalent of two Lake Hefners”—Oklahoma City’s
four-square-mile reservoir—“into the ground each year, and we don’t
really understand where that water is going.”
Austin
Holland, who is forty, joined the Oklahoma Geological Survey in 2010,
shortly after the occurrence of what is called the “Jones
swarm”—seventy-five earthquakes felt in one county, around the town of
Jones, in little more than a year. He said, “When I first came here,
there were swarms, and I thought we were beginning to understand them,
but I would say now—with the increasing rates of seismicity—I’d say all
bets are off.”
I met Holland last
November, at a conference on induced seismicity organized by the O.G.S.
and the U.S.G.S. and held in Midwest City, which is between Norman and
Oklahoma City, the academic and industry centers of Oklahoma,
respectively. Holland grew up in a number of Western states; his mother
worked as an accountant and his father as a librarian and a Methodist
minister.
On the first day of the
conference, a few dozen people were gathered in a small room at the
Sheraton: mostly scientists, but also oil and gas representatives,
insurance representatives, and civil engineers. A bus tour of a local
disposal well was cancelled, owing to icy roads. “I’ll give you the dog
and pony show that I was going to give on the bus, and then I’ll answer
questions and we’ll have a few beers,” Holland said.
The
official position of the O.G.S. is that the Prague earthquakes were
likely a natural event and that there is insufficient evidence to say
that most earthquakes in Oklahoma are the result of disposal wells. That
position, however, has no published research to support it, and there
are at least twenty-three peer-reviewed, published papers that conclude
otherwise.
When I spoke to
Holland, I had the impression of a man who loved science and was
politely trying to endure waking up each day, after insufficient sleep,
to discover himself in the role of a politician. At the conference,
someone asked Holland about several earthquakes of greater than 4.0
magnitude which had occurred a few days earlier, across Oklahoma’s
northern border, in Kansas. Holland joked, “Well, the earthquakes aren’t
stopping at the state line, but my problems do.” There was a follow-up
question: Why had there previously been no quakes in Kansas—and now for a
year and a half there have been so many?
As
the question was asked, a couple of men wandered into the back of the
room, where trays of beer and soda were set up. Holland called out,
“Well, Justin, what do you think of that question?”
The
U.S.G.S.’s Justin Rubinstein, one of the three organizers of the
conference, said, “Um, well, if you map the fluid-injection records and
the earthquake records—there you go.” There was a pause. “I didn’t even
know this meeting was happening—I thought it was cancelled. I just came
down here to get a drink.”
Holland
said, “Well, you heard it from him, not me.” Soon afterward, he
concluded, “I think I’m done sitting here in front of you all. Let’s
relax and continue talking over beers.” Holland had been clear about the
connections between disposal wells and earthquakes, and during the
socializing a researcher from Princeton observed that Holland’s position
seemed to have shifted from that represented in O.G.S. statements. “Let
me think how I can answer that while there’s a reporter standing right
there,” Holland said, lightly. “The O.G.S. is a nonacademic department
of a state university that, like many state universities, doesn’t get
that much funding from the state.” The O.G.S. is part of O.U.’s
Mewbourne College of Earth and Energy, which also includes the
ConocoPhillips School of Geology and Geophysics. About seventeen per
cent of O.U.’s budget comes from the state. “I prepare twenty pages for
those statements and what comes out is one page. Those are not
necessarily my words.”
The
first oil discovered in Oklahoma was found accidentally, in 1859, in a
well drilled to find salt, near present-day Salina; the oil was sold as
fuel for lamps. As related in “Oklahoma Oil: Past, Present, and Future,”
by Dan Boyd, the next find came in 1889, near Chelsea, where a well
produced half a barrel of oil per day; it was used to treat cattle for
ticks. Then, in 1897, a well drilled near Bartlesville became a major
oil producer, and many others followed. Within ten years, Oklahoma was
producing more oil than anywhere else in the world. Not coincidentally,
in 1907, Oklahoma went from being a territory to being the forty-sixth
state. The state constitution includes a legal definition of kerosene.
I
was brought up in Norman, where my father was a professor of
meteorology in the college of geosciences at O.U. Although I had a happy
childhood in Oklahoma, I grew up thinking of the state as an unlucky
one, not so much because of, say, the Dust Bowl, but because of what I
saw around me. One neighbor went bankrupt; another, a Mormon family of
thirteen, had to move out of their barely furnished Tudor-style home and
into a small trailer; another neighbor had a series of brain surgeries
to help with damage from an infancy with an alcoholic parent who shook
her. We had moved to Oklahoma shortly after the millions of dollars made
following the 1979 oil crisis had begun to evaporate. In elementary
school, I knew what “foreclosure” meant. When many local banks closed
down after the savings-and-loan scandal, I had a sweatshirt, popular at
the time, that had within the outlines of the state the words “I Bank at
F.D.I.C.”
Because
I was a kid, the landscape of economic and moral reversals around me
seemed like hailstorms or flash floods, which, although both my parents
worked in weather-related jobs, I thought of as messages from the
capricious but still venerable guy above. When I first began reading
about the earthquakes in Oklahoma, even as I read that they might be
linked to the oil and gas industry, the exact words that came to my mind
were the handily ambiguous “That’s natural.”
Oklahoma
is an oil state. Which is not to say that it is a wealthy state.
Twenty-four per cent of Oklahoman children live in poverty. It is ranked
forty-sixth in over-all health, a measurement that considers such
factors as access to medical care and the affordability of that care. In
2013, a boom oil year, it was among the states that spent the least per
student, and ranked No. 1 in cutting funding to education.
Oil
has brought money to the state, but mostly to a few individuals. The
state budget in Oklahoma in 2014 was seven billion dollars; the net
worth that year of Harold Hamm, the thirteenth child of a sharecropper
from Enid, who heads the oil company Continental Resources, was twice
that.
A statistic from the
Oklahoma Energy Resources Board that is often cited by politicians is
that one in every five jobs in Oklahoma is directly or indirectly
related to the oil and gas industry. (“Directly” accounts for only five
per cent of the jobs.) But by psychological accounting oil and gas can
seem like the whole world. The names of the oil and gas barons—Boone
Pickens, Lloyd Noble, Sarkeys J. Sarkeys—are the names of nearly
everything: the concert hall, the diabetes center, the aquarium, the
football stadium. These “wildcatters” often have compelling
rags-to-riches stories, and their eccentricities make for a kind of
local Kardashian show. When Harold Hamm and his wife, a former executive
of his company, were divorcing, the local press reported on a
handwritten, nine-hundred-and-seventy-five-million-dollar check he wrote
her. A man I know was with his daughter, shopping for a prom dress,
when they ran into David Chernicky, the beloved head of the energy
company New Dominion—“What a sweetheart he is!” the O.G.S. secretary
said to me, apropos of almost nothing—and Chernicky insisted on paying
for the dress and the shoes; he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
New
Dominion’s main field office is in Prague, and many residents are
reluctant to speak about the damage caused by the earthquakes there. A
local, who didn’t want to be named, told me, “I know it sounds crazy,
but I know people whose homes were levelled, and they won’t say
anything.”
For decades, Prague has
celebrated the Kolache Festival each spring, commemorating the town’s
Czech heritage. It’s now preceded by the New Dominion Dayz, a sponsored
fair that raises money for scholarships for graduating high-school
seniors.
In state
government, oil money is both invisible and pervasive. In 2013, Mary
Fallin, the governor, combined the positions of Secretary of Energy and
Secretary of the Environment. Michael Teague, whom she appointed to the
position, when asked by the local NPR reporter Joe Wertz whether he
believed in climate change, responded that he believed that the climate
changed every day. Of the earthquakes, Teague has said that we need to
learn more. Fallin’s first substantive response came in 2014, when she
encouraged Oklahomans to buy earthquake insurance. (However, many
earthquake-insurance policies in the state exclude coverage for induced
earthquakes.)
That
year, Fallin convened the Coördinating Council on Seismicity Activity,
with Teague as its head. The council has no power to enact rules. It met
only twice last year, and the second meeting was held at the same time
as the conference on induced seismicity, in Midwest City, thus
precluding the attendance of most experts. The council met for a third
time this February, but the meeting, like all the previous ones, was
closed to the press.
In September,
2014, at the request of two state representatives, the Oklahoma
legislature conducted an official interim study on induced seismicity.
In subsequent hearings, more than five hours of testimony were presented
to a committee of legislators. Holland, Dana Murphy, of the Oklahoma
Corporation Commission, and Todd Halihan, the professor of geology at
Oklahoma State University, all spoke about the link between disposal
wells and earthquakes. Tim Baker, of the O.C.C., spoke about the link
between drilling into basement rock and earthquakes.
After
the hearings, Mark McBride, the committee chair, issued a press
release. It denied “a correlation between the injection wells and
seismic activity,” and quoted a legislator’s speculation that perhaps
the quakes were caused by “the current drought.” None of the scientists
who had been present were quoted. I called McBride, who at first had no
memory of the study—nor did his secretary. Then McBride remembered it. I
asked what he had learned from it, and he said, “Well, one question I
had for them was about the drought. That maybe the drought is causing
these problems. And I seem to remember that sometimes there’s a problem,
if they drill down too far. But that’s about it, really.”
Between
2009 and 2014, no legislation related to earthquakes was even proposed
by the state legislature. I asked Representative Jason Murphey, one of
the legislators who had called for the interim study—after a town-hall
meeting in his district was filled with seven hundred and fifty angry
and scared residents—whether he felt that the legislature should respond
to the quakes. He said, “I think the most important thing that the
legislature can do is to insure that government regulation doesn’t get
in the way of technologies of wastewater being disposed of by other
means.” The main technology for aboveground treatment of wastewater is a
device called the Koch membrane, developed by Koch Industries; it
filters out most toxins, though it is considered quite expensive, and
can handle only limited volume.
In
the 2015 legislative session, the other state representative who had
convened the interim study, Cory Williams, of Stillwater, has introduced
two earthquake-related bills. One proposes tax breaks for aboveground
water-treatment technologies; the other seeks to make earthquake
insurance more fair to consumers. At least eight bills have been
proposed that aim to make it difficult for communities to set their own
rules for oil drilling.
Some people
argue that the legislature and the governor are ill-equipped to address
the issue of earthquakes, and that the Oklahoma Corporation Commission
is far more powerful. The O.C.C. has three elected commissioners, with
extensive campaign platforms, but not one cites earthquakes as an issue.
The most recently elected commissioner, Todd Hiett, listed on his
campaign Web site nine issues as priorities, including the fight against
“Obama phones”—subsidized cell phones for poor people.
Which
is not to say that the O.C.C. does not hear from the public about
earthquakes. “This is our No. 1 priority,” Matt Skinner, a spokesman for
the O.C.C., told me. “We are thinking about this every day, we are
working on this every day, and we ourselves—some of us—live in
earthquake-prone places. Our houses are shaking, too.”
Yet
the O.C.C. has never denied a permit for a disposal well on the ground
of seismicity. Skinner said that this is because people ask the
commission if a permit is likely to be granted before they apply for it.
“I would estimate that we have told about ten folks in this way,
informally, that their permit is unlikely to pass,” he said. In total,
there has been one fine related to seismicity, for five hundred dollars.
“As of yet, we haven’t needed fines to have compliance,” the O.C.C.
commissioner Dana Murphy told me. “The amount of collaboration and
coöperation we have had around this issue has been tremendous, like
nothing I’ve ever seen.”
Last
September, the O.C.C., in consultation with the O.G.S., developed a set
of best practices, asking for data from disposal wells within a
ten-kilometre radius of earthquakes of magnitude 4.0 or greater, but the
data have not always been timely, and the owners of only a handful of
wells have subsequently been asked to reduce or cease operations. The
radius is, in any case, an arbitrary one; studies suggest that a larger
radius would be more appropriate.
There
remains no rule against drilling into basement rock. “It was never
specifically allowed, and it was never specifically forbidden,” Skinner
explained. The O.C.C. has passed its first rules relating to seismicity
within the past six months. One requires well operators to keep track of
daily volumes and pressures; another requires an annual well
inspection. A third rule proposed will simply require that the O.C.C. be
notified when a well goes into use. “Keeping things as best practices
rather than rules allows the staff to respond more quickly to the
situation,” Skinner said. “Rules take time, and are difficult to
change.”
Last summer, the O.C.C.
asked New Dominion to provide evidence that four wells were not drilled
into basement rock. The O.C.C. said that it was not satisfied with the
evidence presented; it has requested further information, but it has yet
to ask that the wells, which scientists have linked to twenty per cent
of Oklahoma’s seismic activity, reduce their volumes of disposal.
On
the second day of the induced-seismicity conference, there was an
industry panel scheduled, but, at the last minute, most of the
participants cancelled, and the event was called off. Almost no one in
the industry agreed to speak on the record about the earthquakes.
Yet
some individuals acknowledge the problem. After Holland’s talk, a
well-operations engineer said to him, of the O.C.C.’s best-practices
guidelines, which went into effect in the fall of 2014, “Look, I’m not
speaking for my company, I’m just speaking as myself, but I’m surprised
that the O.C.C. didn’t ask for more.” He continued, “We have so much
information.”
The engineer taught me
a lot about enhanced oil-recovery techniques, disposal wells, 3-D
seismic-imaging data, and core sampling. I asked him how he ended up in
petroleum engineering, and he said that he was from Texas, where men
either become football players or cowboys or they go into oil and gas.
“If you’re short like me, and good at math and science, then you go into
oil and gas,” he said. I asked him if I could use his name and he said,
nicely, “Of course you can’t!”
A
couple of days after the conference, I travelled to Stillwater, to
O.S.U.’s Boone Pickens School of Geology, to meet with Todd Halihan, the
geology professor. The town’s low redbrick buildings and cracked
pavement give the impression of a hastily put-together Western town, but
the O.S.U. campus, with its well-tended lawns and fountains, resembles
an American Versailles. In the past year, Stillwater has had more than a
thousand earthquakes. Halihan, one of the few experts in the state to
speak openly about the earthquakes’ relation to oil and gas practices,
has become the go-to guy for communicating to the public the science
behind seismicity.
“I already have
two jobs—I’m a full-time professor and I do consulting,” Halihan said.
“I don’t really have time to do this, but I felt it’s part of my job,
because, in a sense, I work for the state. For so long, it was as if the
earthquakes weren’t happening.”
The
lobby of the Lloyd Noble Research Center is decorated with rose-colored
plaques commemorating donors; the largest plaques honor Devon Energy
and the billionaire alumnus Boone Pickens. Halihan’s office is on the
second floor, and a sign outside reads “Age and treachery always
overcome youth and skills.” Like most scientists I talked to, Halihan
does not believe that there should be a moratorium on disposal wells or
fracking; he just thinks that there should be open discussion, and a
rational plan to avoid triggering the earthquakes that are felt in
Stillwater almost daily.
A milk
bottle filled with what looked like gravel was on his desk. “That’s from
the Arbuckle,” he said, a geological formation under Oklahoma. Like
most geologists, Halihan has experience in the oil and gas industry. He
feels that the business is, in its way, a naturally honest one: “They
make deals on a handshake—you have to have a good reputation or no one
will work with you.”
He went on,
“We know more about the East African Rift than we know about the faults
in the basement in Oklahoma.” In seismically quiet places, such as the
Midwest, which are distant from the well-known fault lines between
tectonic plates, most faults are, instead, cracks within a plate, which
are only discovered after an earthquake is triggered. The O.G.S.’s
Austin Holland has long had plans to put together two updated fault
maps, one using the available published literature on Oklahoma’s faults
and another relying on data that, it was hoped, the industry would
volunteer; but, to date, no updated maps have been released to the
public.
Halihan said, “As scientists, we knew
the Dust Bowl was going to happen; it wasn’t a surprise. It could have
been prevented, but scientists failed to effectively communicate what
they knew to the people. I don’t want that to happen again.”
According
to the Gutenberg-Richter Relation, a series of small earthquakes
suggests that a larger one may take place in the same area. Ten 2.0s
suggest that there may be a 3.0. Ten 3.0s suggest that there may be a
4.0. Recently, a 4.2 and a 4.0 and about a dozen smaller quakes shook
Cushing, Oklahoma, a town of several thousand people that is known as
the Pipeline Crossroads of the World; fifty-four million barrels of oil
are stored there underground. A well near Cushing had been drilled into
the bedrock. “Is that a bad place for an earthquake to occur?” Halihan
said. “You bet it is.”
In
Stillwater, Angela Spotts took me on a drive along dirt roads outside
the city, amid a landscape of scrub brush with little blue-headed
roadrunners skipping past the black pipes that bring water to oil and
gas exploration sites; the formation underground is called the
Mississippi Lime Play. “See, that’s American Energy-Woodford, they’ve
been painting their wells with those red and blue stripes to look so
cheerful,” Spotts said. A year ago, with five others, she founded Stop
Fracking Payne County. She is concerned about the earthquakes and also
about other health and environmental problems associated with fracking.
“I only own a few acres, and I don’t own my mineral rights,” she said.
“I am learning that they can just come on your land and put a well right
there.”
Spotts is one of a number
of Oklahomans acting as gadflies to the state. “We go all the way to
testify to the legislature, and then they still tell us it isn’t
happening,” she said. She knows all the major studies that link disposal
wells to seismicity, and she can name the authors. “I would say I spend
about two-thirds of my day just learning about this—it has taken over
my life,” she said. The activists’ fluent knowledge and ready evidence
can, perversely, make them sound crazy—so much data!—if one forgets that
they are being continually, from all corners, gaslit. “At least with
tobacco, you could choose not to smoke it, but here in Oklahoma—I mean,
how could I choose not to live here?” Spotts said.
Like
Spotts, Robert Jackman, a petroleum geologist, regularly contacts
members of the U.S.G.S., the O.G.S., and the Oklahoma media to update
them on the accumulating peer-reviewed work that links disposal wells to
seismicity. The oft-heard refrain that more studies are needed is a
sore point for Jackman. “We know a cold is spread with sneezing and
coughing, so we cover our nose and mouth, we wash our hands, we take
precautions,” he said. “We don’t need to know exactly what the strain of
virus is or all the technicalities of how the throat becomes inflamed
in order to know to use a handkerchief.”
Earl
Hatley, a Cherokee, has been working for decades on environmental
issues, particularly water pollution. He has master’s degrees in both
environmental and political science, and he was instrumental in raising
awareness about the Tar Creek area—an expanse of abandoned lead and zinc
mines that was named a Superfund site in 1983.
Hatley
has been speaking with the O.C.C. about the earthquakes in the
Stillwater area since November, 2013. He told me, “We had two hundred
and twenty-two earthquakes reported as felt that year, and I said
something should be done, and the O.C.C. basically said to me, ‘Go away,
what’s your problem, that’s no big deal, and there’s no way you can
link earthquakes to disposal wells, you’re just crazy.’ They said this
even though in 2011 the U.S.G.S. was already reporting they were caused
by disposal wells. The U.S.G.S. doesn’t just say things; they’re nearly
as reliable as NASA.”
Devon Energy, one of the largest oil companies in the area, has threatened Hatley with legal action if he doesn’t allow it to perform a 3-D survey*
on his land. “I don’t own the mineral rights,” he explained. “There was
one family who owned the rights to the whole township, and I could
never get them to sell to me.” In the nineteen-eighties, representatives
of an oil company tried to come onto his property to do a seismic
survey, which would have told them how likely they were to find oil.
“But the rule back then was that I could keep them off my property,”
Hatley said. More recently, people from Devon Energy approached him. “I
told them no. I was sure I had the rule on my side. But I went to look
up the rule and I discovered that the rule had changed. Now they were
allowed to come on my property without a seismic survey. I went down to
Payne County to see when that rule change had happened. It happened
fairly recently.” (Devon Energy says that it has no further plans to
drill in Payne County.)
Dea
Mandevill, the city manager for Medford, a small town not far from
Cushing, has been trying to draw attention to the hazard that the daily
earthquakes pose to her town’s aquifer and to the oil pipelines that run
underground. “The industry has been really good for us,” she said.
“There’s a use tax for any equipment brought in from another state, and
also the leases for drilling. Not now, but in past years it’s tripled
our revenues. From the revenue to the county, we’ve bought a new pumper
truck for our fire department, two new brush rigs, two ambulances.” She
continued, “We want to be a good partner for the oil companies—it’s
exciting for us that they’re here. But if they can move the disposal
well even just three miles, what a difference that would make.”
Two
weeks ago, a town-hall meeting was held in Medford. Austin Holland
handed out earthquake-preparedness pamphlets, and representatives of the
O.C.C. spoke about their intention to develop better maps and to ask
for data from a larger number of wells. But there remains no directive
to reduce the volume of fluid disposed of in wells in the Medford area,
as was done fifteen miles north, in Kansas.
The
day of the meeting, the O.C.C. announced that it had requested that
ninety-two companies provide proof that they had not drilled too close
to basement rock. It’s an important step, yet the O.C.C. has at other
times claimed that it already has this information, from routine
inspections, though it has not acted on it, owing to being understaffed.
The same day, the governor’s office announced its biggest response to
the earthquakes to date: allotting an additional fifty thousand dollars
to the O.C.C.
Some argue that it
is a deeply ingrained ethos of Oklahomans to consider freedom from
regulation the most important kind of freedom. A century ago, though,
Oklahoma had one of the strongest populist and socialist parties in the
nation, and in areas other than oil and gas the state has tight
regulations. Recently, solar panels became subject to an additional tax.
The rationale is that when the panels contribute unused energy to the
grid they are using the infrastructure. The fact that money buys policy
is well documented, and much of the money in Oklahoma is oil money. The
wishes and inclinations of the majority of Oklahomans, by contrast, are
difficult to discern.
From the data gathered by her graduate students, Katie Keranen published three papers, one in Geology and two in Science.
They showed how four disposal wells were likely responsible for twenty
per cent of the earthquakes in Oklahoma, and models made by a Ph.D.
student, Matthew Weingarten, demonstrated that earthquakes could be
triggered as far as thirty-five miles from the wells. When Keranen’s
first paper came out, she was still at the University of Oklahoma, where
the geology department and the O.G.S. share a building. (Keranen has
since left her position at O.U., and is now at Cornell.) But the O.G.S.
made, and continues to make, no mention of Keranen’s research on its Web
site, which does include links to relevant outside work. When Keranen
linked the Jones swarm to disposal wells, the O.G.S. linked it to water
levels at nearby Lake Arcadia, producing a study that did not appear in a
peer-reviewed journal. A U.S.G.S. researcher wrote to Holland,
concerned that trying to link the earthquakes to lake levels could be
“distracting from the larger issue of earthquake safety in Oklahoma.”
Holland replied that he was “quite skeptical of the potential link” but
that the O.C.C. had asked him to study it.
The
O.G.S. received an early copy of Keranen’s Prague work. The day before
it was published, the survey’s director at the time, Randy Keller,
posted a position statement saying that the O.G.S. believed that the
Prague quakes most probably resulted from natural causes. The statement,
which also had Austin Holland’s name attached to it, made no mention of
any relevant peer-reviewed scientific research and was itself not
published in a peer-reviewed journal. (Holland said that he was “not
comfortable with the way it was worded.”) To date, no journal-published,
peer-reviewed work on the specific role of disposal wells in Oklahoma’s
earthquakes has come out of the O.G.S. Keller, who has since retired,
told me, “We just go about our business, day to day, locating
earthquakes and scratching our heads and installing new seismic stations
and wondering what the heck is going on. It’s just such a complex,
fuzzy picture.”
E-mail archives of
the O.G.S. reveal that Keller’s objectivity on the issue of induced
seismicity was widely doubted at the university, with one researcher
writing that the agency “couldn’t track a bunny through fresh snow!”
Holland said to me, “My focus now is on getting a clean database
together, so that any researcher—researchers outside of the state or
country, researchers anywhere—can make use of that data.”
In
October, 2013, the U.S.G.S. and the O.G.S. issued a joint press release
warning that the chance of an earthquake of magnitude 5.5 or higher had
“significantly increased.” The release quoted a statement that Oklahoma
has “always been earthquake country,” but no reference to Oklahoma as
“earthquake country”—a consistent talking point of the O.C.C. and the
O.G.S.—can be found in any database predating the recent earthquakes.
Shortly
after the press release, Holland e-mailed a colleague at the O.G.S.,
saying, “I have been asked to have ‘coffee’ with president Boren and
Harold Hamm.” The colleague replied, “Gosh, I guess that’s better than
having Kool-Aid with them.” David Boren, a former U.S. senator, has been
the president of O.U. for twenty years, and sits on the board of Hamm’s
oil company, Continental Resources. Hamm has donated more than thirty
million dollars to O.U.
In another
note after the joint statement, Holland wrote to Keller and the
university’s dean, Larry Grillot, about a meeting he had had with
Patrice Douglas, a commissioner of the O.C.C.: “Jack Stark, the senior
vice-president of exploration with Continental Resources, was there. The
basic gist of the meeting is that Continental does not feel that
induced seismicity is an issue, and they are nervous about any dialogue
about the subject.”
“Of
course, sometimes I wish I was back in an area of scientific research
that only a few experts cared about,” Austin Holland told me. O.G.S. is
understaffed, and from 2010 to 2014 Holland was able to publish only two
peer-reviewed papers, neither dealing specifically with disposal wells.
This year, though, he has already co-written two papers. In late
January, he was one of eight authors of a paper that catalogued the
thirty-six hundred and thirty-nine earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or
greater in Oklahoma between late 2009 and 2014; the paper sidestepped
the question of any relation between energy exploration and earthquakes
but noted that significantly larger earthquakes can be expected to occur
along the fault lines that recent earthquakes have traced. In February,
he was one of twelve authors of a paper, published in the policy forum
of Science, that discussed the now obvious point that induced earthquakes are not, like natural earthquakes, a matter of chance.
Chance
is important to the oil and gas industry, which retains something of
the luck-culture mythos of its earliest days. Companies are usually
called “players,” and they “win” or “are awarded” contracts; the areas
they explore are “plays.” Once, there was a fair amount of chance
involved in striking oil. Stories of poor people coming across “gushers”
on their property, or of discovering unknown inheritances of mineral
rights, are emotionally important, and widely shared, in Oklahoma. And
the tradition of Okie endurance—of uncomplainingly handling dust storms,
tornadoes, poor soil, economic depressions—heightens the sense that
Lady Fortune spins you up, spins you down. Maybe it’s not surprising
that Oklahoma’s earthquakes have been in large part treated as simply
one more hardship to withstand, a matter of bad luck following good.
But
today the oil and gas industry understands that exploration is not a
matter of a lucky hand. Science is as powerful epistemologically as it
is weak politically. “I don’t rely on luck,” David Chernicky told the
Oklahoma City Journal Record, in 2010, about a dewatering
process he helped develop. “I rely on science because I’ve never been
lucky in my life.” He continued, “I never won a raffle. The only thing I
got was out of a Cracker Jack box, but then everybody gets something
out of that box.” ♦
*An earlier version of this article misstated the basis of Devon Energy’s threat to take legal action.
Source: Rivka Galchen
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-underground
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