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Comment by barney54 | Hacker News Reader

This heading (and the heading of the article itself) are wrong. If you read the article it is not that "drilling" reawakens sleeping faults, but that deep injection wells do. Deep injection wells are one way to dispose of produced water from oil and gas production.

So it's not "drilling" that is at issue, but injecting water for disposal that awaken faults.

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Actually there are only two major methods of drilling both include injection of a product. For core drilling you inject water/"mud" to remove cuttings and for RC you use air pressure to remove cuttings. Injection is intrinsic to drilling. I'm yet to hear of a deep hole rig that doesn't use injection.

So yes it is the drilling that is the problem.

Note: I worked on drill rigs for half a year punching holes to 1.6km.

The science to date has linked the quakes to deep salt water disposal wells lubricating faults. These wells are taking flowback and produced water from oil wells once they are put on production. The earthquake phenomenon is not related to circulating "mud" during drilling.

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.

The article is talking about wastewater injection. Injecting mud while drilling isn't causing stress on faults, but rather wastewaster injection.

Wastewater injection isn't drilling. That's why the title is mislabled.

So to reword the title to be accurate in your eyes would

> Current Drilling Techniques Reawaken Sleeping Faults in Texas

work? The injection of water is part of how they currently operate, if there are other ways for them to drill then society should decide whether the increased costs are worth it but... how they currently drill is causing this issue.

That's incorrect; as the OP said, how they drill is not the alleged issue.

I think you mean how they "produce". Two completely separate things. There are many production methods. Wells can be drilled in several ways, and several different kinds of production can happen on them.

That is a purely semantic argument and you know it.

Semantics is important. People are making decisions based on semantics.

It's pretty common to use the word "drilling" to refer to the whole process of extraction. I guess that'd be an example of synecdoche.

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