Fracking: It’s effects and how cities cannot stop a permitted driller

Fracking leads to minor quake in Niles

By: Danielle Hess

Hydraulic Fracturing has shook Niles and Youngstown with minor seismic waves in recent years, but Donald Palmer, Kent State geology professor, said Kent residents shouldn’t agonize over earthquakes erupting locally.

Palmer said earthquakes could result from the injection of high-pressured fluids, but the effect in minimal, and can quickly be stopped by halting or shutting down the process.

“There’s a long history of an established relationship between pumping high-pressure fluids into the ground and creating earthquakes,” Palmer said.

“The stresses that would cause an earthquake are already there in the earth. What would happen is that when you pump high-pressure fluids in, you basically reduce the shear strength of the rock, and it’s that strength that tends to keep from having an earthquake or ground motions.”

When it comes to the possibility of revisiting old wells, such as the well near the Porthouse theatre on Theatre Drive in Kent, Palmer said pumping or drilling gas out of an old well doesn’t necessarily make an earthquake more likely.

“The earthquakes that come up are not gently done in most oil and gas exploitation,” he said. “It’s the fracking of shallow rock which is causing this, and since these wells, to my knowledge, were not shale gas wells, but they are back to exploiting fairly deep gas-buried strata, we don’t have a history of earthquakes relating to that in this area.”

Injection wells are another method of obtaining gas, and Palmer said this process normally doesn’t renderearthquakes because the injection is not high-pressured. This method naturally creates a salty water waste called brine, which must be disposed of properly.

“[Brine] is not something that we put in, but it is natural in the process,” Palmer said. “You have to get rid of it when it comes up, and you don’t want to put it into a stream or lake, so the approved method is to inject it back into the ground.”

Some people fear that shooting the water waste back into the ground could contaminate fresh ground water sources, but Palmer said this only happens if there is a leak.

“If water is spilled, it can pollute groundwater, but most injection wells have an attachment base right around where they’re doing this that catches the waste,” he said. “Injection wells are old production wells, and when the reservoir is empty, it’s the perfect place to pump fluids back in.”

When it comes to polluting the air with coal burning, Palmer said Ohio should consider updating their technology, and come up with a way to obtain natural gas.

“I think that if you take a look at the range of energy resources in Ohio, coal tends to be the dirtiest burning thing that we have,” Palmer said. “From that standpoint, it may be worth a risk in developing new technology to get natural gas, which is very much more cleaner to burn because there is less carbon.”

There is currently one active oil production well in Portage County, located near Route 18 in Rootstown. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources tracks all the wells and permits for the state, check the complete list here.

Pawel Rybak, president of the environmental conservation group at Kent State, said expanding the fracking industry could possibly hurt the city of Kent in the long run.

“Fracking could be an environmental threat to Kent in the future if oil corporations continue their push into Ohio and an expanded fracking industry,” Rybak said.

Referring to the Monroe Falls vs. Beck Energy case, a dispute involving issues with fracking permits from the state and the town’s want to close down Beck Energy’s fracking operation, Rybak said the state has an interesting connection with the oil companies.

“I find it interesting that local and state governments have a strong history of working together, and this current issue of power has shifted much of the legal power local governments had to act for or against fracking to the state government,” he said. “In the past, both in the U.S. and abroad, grassroots organizations partnered with their local governments have had success in preventing the oil and gas industry from expanding fracking near their homes.”

Rybak said there is a well-built relationship between the state and oil and gas business.

“The oil and gas industry has a strong relationship with state governments, and the ruling falls in favor of the fracking industry,” Rybak said.