Drilling down on fracking in Indiana

Fracking proponents say the practice lessens the U.S. reliance on foreign oil, creates jobs and leads to energy savings in American households. Those who oppose U.S. drilling and using fossil fuels point to accidents at oil wells with detrimental environmental effects, such as a January pipeline leak in North Dakota that spilled 3 million gallons of brine and contaminated two creeks.

And a recently documented natural phenomenon near wastewater injection sites — a byproduct of fracking — has provided environmentalists with another argument against unconventional drilling.

“It turns out that many things that we do that affect the subsurface of the Earth are also capable of triggering earthquakes,” said Michael Hamburger, a professor of geological sciences at Indiana University. “This is one of the unexpected side effects of oil and gas exploration. There are places in Kansas or Texas that have never experienced an earthquake that have now experienced an earthquake and have no idea what to do about them.”

The risk of earthquakes and other seismic activity correlates with wastewater injection, not fracking, though one cannot exist without the other. After a “frack job,” the water and chemical mixtures used to make a well productive must be disposed of in a manner approved by the Environmental Protection Agency. Some of this fluid is cleaned at water treatment plants, but much more is injected back into the Earth.

“The easiest and arguably the safest way to dispose of these is to pump them back into the subsurface in so-called wastewater injection wells,” Hamburger said.