Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat | Hacker News Reader

Oklahoma Earthquakes Are a National Security Threat

bloomberg.com

81 pointsakg_6722 comments

This reminds me of the Oklahoma ghost town that resulted from unregulated mining practices[0].

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Picher,_Oklahoma

For those interested in more on the topic of the earthquakes: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/04/13/weather-undergr...

Good information in The New Yorker piece, unlike the continuing coverage I have been reading in Bloomberg, which uses fracking as a refrain with minimal information attached.

This is about disposal of waste water from watered-out fields, not about fracking. The New Yorker correctly points out less than 10% of the water going down these disposal wells is from fracking operations. So why does Bloomberg (and not just Bloomberg) keep raising the fracking bogey-man?

Wastewater injection wells, contrary to popular press, are not used primarily for the disposal of fracking fluid or other drilling waste products. Produced water is, by far, the largest component going into wastewater injection wells.

When you get oil and gas out of the ground, a lot of salt water comes with it. Sometimes, especially in Oklahoma, there can be 10 times as much water as oil. This "produced water" is used for injection into other wells to displace oil, but there's enough left over to require wastewater injection wells for its disposal.

http://energyindepth.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/02/Wastewat...

The most amazing part of this article is the U.S. would use this seemingly massive reserve in 3 days.

If you think Cushing storage of 3 days is massive, you will be shocked with Strategic Petroleum Reserve maintained by US govt, that covers a large swath underground below Texas and Louisiana states, and only holds about 30 days of consumption.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Petroleum_Reserve_%2...

Actually, Cushing storage is not that much. Unlike SPR, it is mostly short term storage in between transit. Cushing is a transfer point between different pipelines that connect at Cushing which also later became a delivery point for oil and gas futures traded in futures market.

The norm for a country's total reserves is 90 days of imports (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_strategic_petroleum_r...)

US imports are about 1/4 of consumption (http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=32&t=6), so total reserves (including commercial storage) should be around 25 days.

As to Cushing, from both the article and what you say I would be more concerned about losing those pipes than of losing the oil stored there.

True, but consider how much flour America uses in 3 days: according to the USDA[1] we're looking at about 150,000 tons of flour per day.

We use a lot of stuff.

[1] http://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/chart-gallery/detail.a...

If everything else went to zero, sure. But if everything else went to absolute zero, there are bigger problems than running out of reserves in Cushings, right? Technically if all other input was completely unavailable, I imagine it would have to be some root cause which would probably make the oil in these tanks unmovable as well.

I've read the strategic reserves are more a political play, and a impressive engineering feat, but actually drawing them down doesn't provide nearly the economic value versus just the fact we have them.

The role that fracking plays in the rise of earthquakes has been hugely controversial in Oklahoma, where one in five jobs is tied to the oil and gas industry.

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” ― Upton Sinclair

Try fracking under his house and he will understand it...

yeah i guess. or just wait it out for nature to respond, and leave the area in a mess. Either way at some point they will have to notice.

Fracking is not the same thing as injection wells.

What isn't a national security threat now?

Cyber-dildonics, most likely.

Maybe not a security threat, but a national threat nonetheless[1].

[1] http://gizmodo.com/the-annual-love-and-sex-with-robots-confe...

Since 9/11, the threshold for being considered national security has gone down significantly, too much paranoia. Of course the private businesses, in this case O&G companies, trading exchange and trading firms, benefit from certain assets being declared of national security importance as the cost of securing get transferred to the government and taxpayers.

Thanks for that financing context, sad that Bloomberg forgot to add it.

Yeah, whatever. Let's see the US run out of oil, then let's wait 30 days or so, and then you try telling me (if you're still alive) that it's not a national security issue.

Oil is sold through OPEC, the US won't run out of oil in isolation (and of course it won't run out at all).

Oil is also distributed all over the earth at various costs to extract, so oil would rise in price as a commodity decades before it actually runs out. It would gradually price itself out of different uses.

Given the resistance to equate increased earthquake activity elsewhere, it is interesting to see fracking stopped due to earthquake concerns at the oil reserves. I suspect this could be a strong argument to use in other cities experiencing previously-rare earthquakes, like Plano, TX.

http://earthquaketrack.com/us-tx-plano/recent

The Denver Rocky Flats injection quakes of the 1960s stopped within months of halting injections. I dont think ending oil production is politically platable, so they will have to find alternative waste treatment.

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