The number of people at risk for earthquake damage brought on by oil and gas activity is expected to plummet this year, thanks to state regulations as well as market forces, according to a federal forecast released Wednesday.
The U.S. Geological Survey’s 2017 report on earthquakes predicted that about 3.5 million people face significant potential for damage from induced earthquakes, a sharp decline from the 2016 forecast of about 7 million.
Most of those at risk in 2017 from potentially hazardous human-caused earthquakes live in Oklahoma and southern Kansas.
“The story is generally good news in terms of potential damage from induced or man-made earthquakes,” Mark Petersen, chief of the USGS National Seismic Hazard Mapping Project, said in a press call. “Generally, the chance of damage is decreased.”
Mr. Petersen chalked up the earthquake decreases to “regulatory actions by state officials starting about 2014, when they restricted injections and closed some wells, but it’s also potentially related to the declining price of oil, which reduced injected volumes of wastewater.”
The report published Wednesday in Seismological Research Letters also found that the number of “felt earthquakes,” or those above magnitude 2.7, declined in 2016. Earthquakes below magnitude 2.7 are typically detectable only by instruments.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/mar/1/earthquake-damage-as-result-of-oil-and-gas-activit/
Great example of Fake News in Headline, which states an earthquake problem from oil drilling.
Nowhere in the body content is that stated, instead it is by injection, not drilling or fraccing.
