"YOUNGSTOWN'S EARTHQUAKES"

First of all thank God, no damage and no one was hurt.  My cat "Jasper" is fine, I was at the store in Poland shaking with my wife and Jasper was half a mile from the epicenter.  Both our historic 1850 store and our 1920 home suffered no apparent damage.  This being said, majority of us in Youngstown are cognizant of the injection well and the studies going on resulting in a moratorium on injection wells that have been punched recently in our backyards.  Youngstown has seen its industrial industry vanish here and suffered the lowest poverty in the nation today.  We do however understand industry and we remember high paying jobs.

 

There is an old tale here that many steel mill fathers and mothers always told their offsprings, look at the black smoke coming from the stacks, that is the picture of money and jobs.  Yes, we knew for every production of man, their is always a counterproduction.  And the poor immigrants who built the great steel mills, understood that benefits outweighed the stark poverty they came from.  Youngstown once boast the most home ownership in the WORLD, come see what is left of the homesteads, wiped out by entitlements and non production. 

 

Yes, we will shut down the injection wells until we find an answer and can evolve with understanding and safety measures.  Of course the experts are here now and American innovation will figure it out.  However, with the fact of freezing to death and energy dependence, our only option without PERPETUAL MOTION is to plow ahead.  Make no mistake us here in Youngstown will harvest the energy underneath us and we will figure out how to handle the byproduct without dumping it into the Mahoning river, and if we conclude that this one injection well is dangerous we will shut this one down but no other. 

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Permalink Reply by dr j on January 3, 2012 at 1:13am

Chance- please tell me you are NOT in any type of "science minded" profession.    According to your thinking anything that happens within a certain radius of anything else is "proof" of a cause and effect relationship between the two.    I would hope you want a little more critical thinking and investigation in your world.  I certainly do in mine.

 

Permalink Reply by Schnoozie on January 3, 2012 at 9:04am

Got an idea, move the rigs back over to PA.

I will go sweep my driveway, get some 5 gallon coolers of gatoraide and hot chocolate, maybe some deli sandwitch rings for the crews. Thanks.

Permalink Reply by Dan on January 3, 2012 at 11:19am

dr j,  I think the only proof of cause and effect in this matter is we have let our education system go and this is the effect..................one persons tremor is another persons quake.

Permalink Reply by ji on January 3, 2012 at 10:14am

My God Chance, what more compelling evidence do you need? 

Permalink Reply by ji on January 3, 2012 at 10:44am

 After what you've heard here on this site, how can you possibly relate earthquakes to a waste injection disposal well! Unbelievable.

Permalink Reply by Dan on January 3, 2012 at 12:11pm

ti, I don't think you have read everything posted on this site.  There is plenty of rhetoric and opinions from armchair geologists going on, but if you read the articles people have been posting on this site, or even better, just research the findings of real geologists, you will see that:

  1. It is possible to trigger earthquakes with injection wells, if the liquid reaches a fault zone under stress and lubricates it.  This has happened before, both accidentally and on purpose, and is well-documented.
  2. It is considered likely that in the case of the Youngstown disposal well, that fluid is somehow making its way down to a fault and triggering the small quakes that have been occuring.
  3. Not every earthquake is triggered by an injection well somewhere, and probably most injection wells do nothing to trigger an earthquake.
  4. Injection wells accept other waste liquids besides frac water, so it is not really a gas drilling issue at all, except that the majority of the waste going into these wells currently is frac water.
  5. Hydro-fracing involved with new wells being drilled is not being blamed for triggering any earthquakes.  Only disposal wells are.

And Chance is not a drilling hater, at least he doesn't appear that way I read his posts.  People are getting way too defensive and way too nasty with him when he comments.  We need to not be afraid of the truth.  This gas and oil mineral extraction is not a magic energy source that is without any possible negative side effects.  If there are problems with any part of the process, lets face them, analyse them, figure out good solutions, and then move forward.

Permalink Reply by Brett R Oxley on January 4, 2012 at 8:16am

Well, said Sir. Let's use logic and science  to form opinions and conduct solid research on the issues as they arise to reduce/eleiminate the issues and to prevent future issues in new areas. Name calling is not going to solve any problems.

Permalink Reply by Howard Markert on January 20, 2012 at 10:21am

Actually per ODNR and the EPA Class II Injection Wells are specifically for the waste products from oil and gas production.  There are other classes of wells for other types of waste.

Permalink Reply by Brian Powers on January 23, 2012 at 9:01am

From my experience, it benefits operators of injection/disposal wells to gravity feed the waste fluids into the permeable disposal zones. The use of pumps adds greatly to the operating costs. Further, if injection fluid lubricates faults, which I highly doubt, then the quantities required to lubricate over a large surface area would be enormous. Remember that only maybe 15-30% of the fluid pumped to perform a frac gets recovered- the remainder stays permanently  trapped in the interstitial spaces of the rock or is lost into small natural fractures. Clear fluids are horribly inefficient fracturing fluids due to the tendency for leak off, which greatly reduces the hydraulic force capability Finally, fracturing occurs perpendicular to the least principal rock stress; to initiate enough hydraulic force to trigger an earthquake would take more pump capacity and fluid than is practically available onshore US

Permalink Reply by Billy Park Whyde on January 3, 2012 at 11:11am

here you can find a history of earth quakes in  Ohio http://earthquake.usgs.gov/earthquakes/states/?region=Ohio now as you can well see earth quakes have happened in Ohio way before injection wells were drilled or hydrofracking was even though of.  

 The term compelling evidence I question as a so called expert used the big word "ALMOST" as in this story, see 

Permalink Reply by brett merryman on January 3, 2012 at 11:37am

I think it's Jim Traficant.

Permalink Reply by George Brown on January 20, 2012 at 11:31am

"Beam me up, Mr. Speaker."

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