“There’s plenty of areas where we inject gallons and gallons and gallons of water and don’t cause any earthquakes at all. ![]() “It does depend a lot on the area,” she added. “Is that change in the stress field enough to cause earthquakes.” “There are researchers that do modeling that looks at the stress field underneath the subsurface,” and they’ll say, given what we know about the geology and the stress field in this area, how is that going to change if we start injecting this many gallons of water per month?” Bogolub said. Kyren Bogolub, a seismologist with the Colorado Geological Survey, said it’s not always possible to definitively attribute an individual earthquake to wastewater injection, but scientists are making strides in understanding how to mitigate risks in the long run. A series of earthquakes triggered by those injections included a magnitude 4.8 that caused over $1 million damages in Denver. That is exactly what is happening in this case.”Ĭolorado has a long history with induced seismicity, beginning with liquid waste injections undertaken at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal chemical weapons plant in 1962. A good analogy is an air hockey table - the puck doesn’t move very easily when the air is off, (but) the air turns on and the puck moves very easily. “These fluids, they propagate to a preexisting fault in the area,” Rubinstein said. Extracting coalbed methane often requires pumping large volumes of dirty, salty water out of the ground as a byproduct, then returning it even deeper underground via injection wells. Since the late 1990s, parts of the Raton Basin in both Colorado and New Mexico have been significant producers of coalbed methane, a kind of natural gas found in coal deposits. Geological Survey, Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission) “In accordance with COGCC’s risk-based seismic hazard mitigation approach as it pertains to injection wells, COGGC has discussed applicable strategies with the relevant operators, and will continue to take appropriate steps as needed.” Maps showing the location, in yellow, of earthquakes detected west of Trinidad on March 9 and 10, 2023, along with the location, in blue, of wastewater injection wells associated with methane gas production in the area. “COGCC is aware of the seismic events that recently took place in the Raton Basin,” an agency spokesperson said in a statement. The Colorado Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, the state agency that regulates drilling and injection wells, adopted its first-ever rules to evaluate the risk of induced seismicity as part of a broader overhaul of drilling regulations approved in 2020. ![]() Large volumes of produced water began to be injected in the area in 1999. Only a single earthquake with a magnitude of 4 or greater was recorded in the Raton Basin between 1972 and July 2001, the USGS study noted, compared to 12 recorded between August 20. ![]() Other studies, including several from researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, have reached similar conclusions, and “induced seismicity” from injection wells and other oil and gas operations has been observed in other states like Oklahoma and Kansas. Rubinstein was the lead author of a 2014 USGS study that found that wastewater injection was “responsible for inducing the majority of” Raton Basin seismicity over the preceding 13 years.
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