Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes

No doubt the science has linked that to it, but you also regularly fill faults whilst drilling for core or hell even when drilling water bore holes. If the grounds crap you just pump mud with some additives in till the holes are blocked or your at least retain some pressure. I'm gonna throw it out there also, having worked amongst it most drillers/holes that are drilled...we know piss all about whats going on down there. Hell we had one hole that was LITERALLY within 50m of the side wall of an open cut mine, we drilled down past the open cuts depth from surface because our targets were for next to segments of the underground mine that went off the open cut. We lost water pressure/return for a good week, had to cart loads in and mix it plenty thick to try and plug the hole. Few weeks into the job, the other offsider went for a walk in a direction we didn't usually go for a piss, about 100m away he came across all our drilling fluid forming a small lake in the windrows above the open cut. Geologists had no clue why it had happened or why we had lost water in the first place leading up to that discovery.

The point is, drilling sure as shit isn't an exact science, you should probably be more skeptical about its effects than not. Most drillers aren't some highly educated academic that knows exactly whats going on down hole...most of them have been hired because they have the mechanical aptitude to fix just about anything that can go wrong with a rig or have the perseverance to push through the horrible conditions, both above ground and down hole to get the job done. Drilling be it through the process itself or the result of its action definitely plays a role in the problem.

That is a purely semantic argument and you know it.

I agree with this. The model would be the US Vaccine Injury Compensation Fund. The idea is all drillers pay an excise tax into a fund, and this fund acts as insurance for anyone who can show damages by an earthquake in a drilling area.

More like millions of years hence, if they haven't been active for 300 million years.

We do similar for flood insurance. These quakes are not the devastating kind. They range in the <M4 scale, so it'll be mostly toppled chimneys and adornments, perhaps some brick walls might collapse. The damages are typically in the "minor", possibly escalating to "moderate" but not "major", so there would not be armies of lawyers trawling for claimants. But this is still a nuisance which needs to be addressed for property and infrastructure owners as well as an incentive for the industry to find better solutions to disposing drilling water byproducts.

Ah looks like the lobbyists came to share some downvotes for information they didn’t like (or maybe a normal user from oil country?)

I can’t imagine why someone would downvote factual information that adds to the discussion. The downvote option wasn’t added so people could hide comments they disagree with. I’ve personally met dozens of people who’ve signed NDAs with natural gas companies but live in denial if you insist.

Well to be fair if you drill for a little while in an area and start experiencing earthquakes then one might naturally wonder whether more drilling will lead to even more problems.

The roads in most of the fracking areas are terrible and its often hard to pinpoint whether damage was caused by heavy fracking trucks simply driving on these small roads frequently versus seismic activity versus something else. That doesn’t mean there isn’t damage, it’s just difficult to account for and externalized.

More significantly, there are major changes inside the earth that occur. If you pump a bunch of poisonous fracking fluids into the ground and then drill out a bunch of shale, you’ve replaced a solid layer of shale with fracking fluids and air. Naturally things can mix more since there isn’t a tough layer of shale. The shale is normally pretty close to the aquifer layer which means you now have seismic activity mixing your fracking fluids and shale remnants with your drinking water. Just because the layman may not immediately see the consequences, doesn’t mean they aren’t there. And in most of the big fracking areas there are enough houses without drinkable water that people know something bad is happening even if they can’t pinpoint the exact mechanism. If you drive around those areas, you’ll notice many houses with what are known as water buffalo tanks outside to provide their house with drinkable water. Typically the gas company pays for these because the families in the area have threatened lawsuits or other action after their houses lost drinkable water.