
Jeremy Buckingham MLC via Flickr CC-BY-2.0
FOR YEARS NOW the oil and gas industry has argued that “seismic activity caused by hydraulic fracturing is not a hazard or a nuisance.”
The powerful industry, which bills the brute-force technology as “safe and proven,” repeatedly downplayed the earthquake risks the same way it belittled the threat of climate change.
The Colorado Oil and Gas Association confidently declared, for example, that pumping large volumes of pressurized fluids to crack rock will indeed create small magnitude quakes but this activity “cannot be detected at the surface.”
The American Petroleum Institute was even bolder. It boasted that hydraulic fracturing “does not cause earthquakes” or create vibration “of noticeable size.”
But Canadian and American fracking operations have since proved the lobbyists very wrong. The industry has also rewritten the continent’s seismic record in shale gas fracking zones.
Read more Energy Matrix columns.
Popular on A\J
More by this Author
- RT @PaulHBeckwith: Black-browed babbler found in Borneo 180 years after last sighting https://t.co/ZjHrFBbg4H — 7 hours 26 min ago
- A\J is seeking volunteer writers who may be interested in contributing a cli-fi, futuristic, intergenerational, uto… https://t.co/s0xrZHcK72 — 4 days 14 hours ago
- Planting trees to mitigate climate change is not as simple as you might think. Tree planting actually has great pot… https://t.co/gH39xQJhE8 — 5 days 12 hours ago