In Braxton, there's a whole lotta shakin' going on
Is Gas Drilling Causing Earthquakes?
Charleston Gazette
29 August 2010
FRAMETOWN, W.Va. -- What's shaking in Braxton County these days?
For the past five months, pretty much everything - especially the area
surrounding the communities of Frametown and Gassaway.
Since April 4, eight small earthquakes have been recorded in Braxton
County, and another two in nearby Lewis and Upshur counties. The
seismic events ranged in magnitude from 2.2 to 3.4 - not strong enough
to cause significant damage, but powerful enough to rattle shelves,
awaken sleepers and stimulate speculation as to their origin.
"It's been the big talk of the town," said Geneva Flint, who works at
Granny's Kitchen in Frametown. "People would come here and discuss the
earthquakes and wonder about what's causing them - but we've had so
many now, it's starting to get a little old."
In the Frametown area, the most memorable tremor was the first in this
year's series - a 3.4 magnitude quake that took place at 5:10 a.m. on
April 4, which was Easter Sunday.
"I thought a tree had fallen on the house," said Lynette Grantham, who
lives between Frametown and Gassaway. When she investigated and found
that it hadn't, she went online and learned that an earthquake had been
recorded.
Because noticeable tremors are such rare occurrences in the area,
"Everyone I've talked to thought they were crazy for feeling something
that night, until they found out it was an earthquake," Grantham said.
The April 4 earthquake, with an epicenter a few miles west of
Frametown, was followed by three quakes on April 29, each of them also
centered within a few miles of Frametown and Gassaway. On May 7 and 8,
quakes measuring magnitude 2.6 and 2.8, with epicenters on both sides
of Interstate 79 near the Servia rest area, were recorded, followed by
temblors of magnitude 2.4 and 2.2 on July 24 and 25, both centered just
west of Gassaway.
On Aug. 15, a magnitude-2.5 quake was recorded near the community of
Ireland, about two miles inside Lewis County from the Braxton County
line. A similar size quake took place Aug. 21 a few miles to the
southeast at a point just inside the Upshur County boundary near
Kanawha Head.
Among area residents puzzled by the profusion of earthquakes in a
seismically quiet area was Braxton
Citizens' News publisher Ed Given.
"I'm 60, and I've lived here all my life," he said, "and never heard of
any earthquakes happening here."
As the quakes continued, Given tried to identify something different
taking place in his county that could be related to the increased
seismic activity.
Between Frametown and Gassaway, a cluster of 12 storage tanks had been
installed at a site across W.Va. 4 from the Coastal Lumber mill the
previous year.
"I heard rumors that they were injecting fluids from the tanks into an
old mine or old wells or something," said Given. "It was one of the
only things different or new happening around here."
While he kept that tidbit of information in mind, he didn't immediately
know what to do with it.
After four quakes rattled the county in April, followed by two more in
May, Given received a letter to the editor from Marshall University
geology professor Ronald Martino in June, addressing the topic of local
earthquakes.
"I realize there has been some anxiety over the recent earthquakes in
Braxton County," he wrote. "It is quite possible that these earthquakes
are the result of fluid injection. Drilling in the Marcellus Shale for
natural gas in Northern West Virginia has involved hydrofracking of
horizontal wells, which has produced large amounts of wastewater. The
disposal of this water, as well as brine that is produced from oil and
gas wells, is injected back into the earth at a depth of up to several
thousand feet."
Martino added that geologists have known for a half-century that "fluid
injection along locked faults can trigger small to moderate
earthquakes." The increase in fluid pressure, he wrote, essentially
lubricated "the frictional resistance to movement along the fault zone,
allowing the fault to slip more readily."
Martino wrote that at least one disposal well was in use in Braxton
County, at a site off W.Va. 4 about 2.5 miles north of the Frametown
exit of Interstate 79, which Given realized was near the point where
the new storage tanks had been placed.
The Marshall professor said he didn't know who operated the injection
well, but he wrote that its "potential impact on faults beneath Braxton
County should be explored further," and said he was forwarding his
concerns to the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey.
Given began scanning the Internet for information on the use of fluid
injection, or hydro-fracturing, as a process for extracting gas,
particularly gas trapped beneath the deep Marcellus Shale formation now
attracting interest from drillers across West Virginia, including in
Braxton County. He also developed contacts at the West Virginia
Department of Environmental Protection, and learned that the disposal
well mentioned by Martino was a 6,500-foot-deep unproductive Marcellus
well drilled by Chesapeake Appalachia LLC that had later been licensed
as an underground injection well by the DEP in 2008.
Given discovered that the well, located 1.5 miles up Lower Rock Camp
Hollow from the new storage tanks, has been used to dispose of more
than 10.6 million gallons of brine and hydraulic fracturing fluids
between March of 2009 and June of this year.
He also learned that the fluids had been used in the extraction of gas
from Marcellus formations in the Rock Cave area in Upshur County. After
they were pumped out of the ground, they were trucked to Frametown,
offloaded in the tanks off W.Va. 4, and then pumped up the hollow and
injected more than one mile into the earth through the Chesapeake well.
"We've been recycling a lot of our frack water at the drilling site,"
said Chesapeake Energy production superintendent Scott Nease, during a
tour of his company's Braxton County disposal operation on Thursday.
"That reduces the amount of water that has to be taken to wells like
this. Basically, we're just putting it back into the earth, from whence
it came."
The state-of-the-art pumping station for the Chesapeake disposal well
was built 18 months ago, and began injecting brine and recovered
fracking fluids last March. Tanker trucks operated by Hawg Haulers, a
Chesapeake subsidiary, carry waste fluids from the Rock Cave Marcellus
gas fields to the site, and offload into six receiving tanks. The water
is then passed through 50- and 25-micron filters to remove sand and
grit, and pumped into six "clean" tanks, before being pumped through a
buried pipeline 1.5 miles to the well head, after anti-rust agents have
been added to prevent corrosion to the well casing.
A concrete containment wall surrounds the storage tanks to provide
protection in the event of a leak or spill, and automatic shutoff
valves have been installed to halt pumping in the event of a pipeline
rupture.
"The well is licensed to not exceed 2,100 pounds per square inch of
pressure at the surface, but water is being injected at only about 200
pounds now, and it's never been above 700 pounds," said Gene Smith,
regulatory compliance manager for the DEP.
Meanwhile, Smith said, "We're looking at the mechanics of the well, the
geology of the area, and the events that have been happening in the
area, to see, from a scientific level, if what's taking place could
cause earthquakes." So far, he said, no correlation has been
determined.
Smith said there are 70 similar brine-disposal wells in West Virginia,
including some that accept water in volumes larger than is injected
into the Frametown well. None of them have been known to produce
seismic events, he said.
Even so, Smith said, the DEP and Chesapeake are discussing possible
seismic monitoring near the Braxton County disposal well, and the gas
production company has agreed to a DEP recommendation to reduce the
volume of water being injected into the well.
In August of last year, Chesapeake Energy shut down two brine-disposal
wells in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, after a series of
earthquakes ranging from magnitudes of 2.5 to 3.3 were recorded in
close proximity to one of them.
The wells were used to dispose of brine produced by drilling for
natural gas in the Barnett Shale formation. Quake epicenters were
recorded within 3,300 linear feet, and about 1,000 vertical feet, from
the base of a disposal well drilled on the grounds of Dallas-Fort Worth
International Airport, which had accepted 2.8 million barrels of water
during the past year.
In a Dallas Morning News article, Cliff Frohlich, associate director of
the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics, said the presence of
the injection well and the onset of earthquakes is related.
"We have not proven it with scientific certainty," he said, "but we're
looking at these as induced earthquakes."
"We know that natural seismicity has long been observed in this part of
Appalachia, and that natural seismic activity often occurs in
clusters," Chesapeake Energy spokeswoman Maribeth Anderson said in a
statement regarding the Braxton County quakes.
Anderson said 25 earthquakes have been reported within 100 miles of the
Braxton County tremors during the past 10 years, including a magnitude
2.5 quake that occurred on Oct. 16, 2000.
That said, "We are working cooperatively with the West Virginia DEP to
better understand the location and timing of the recent minor seismic
activity," Anderson said.
"There are no earthquakes to speak of in that part of West
Virginia," said Martin Chapman, director of the Virginia Tech Seismic
Observatory. "Earthquakes of the size recorded this year near Gassaway
could happen naturally, but probably not so many, so close together.
... Something's going on there, and I have a strong suspicion that it's
something associated with drilling. As more Marcellus wells are
developed, I think we'll be seeing more of this happening in West
Virginia."
"Injection in other parts of the country is believed to cause pressure
conditions that can reactivate old, inactive fault lines and cause
small earthquakes," said Michael Hohn, state geologist and director of
the West Virginia Geological and Economic Survey.
"As far as I know, there's no definite answer as to what's causing
these earthquakes," Hohn said, "but when they are clustered like that,
it's time to pay attention."
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, the strongest earthquake in
otherwise seismically quiet West Virginia took place on Nov. 19, 1969,
when a 4.3 magnitude quake cracked plaster and shattered windows in
Athens and Lerona, in Mercer County.
On Aug. 11, 1970, a small shock in the west-central part of the state
was felt from Charleston to St. Albans and Hurricane.
Reach Rick Steelhammer at rsteelham...@wvgazette.com or
304-348-5169.