Mary Duenwald, Columnist

Wastewater Wells Are Shaking Oklahoma

Some fracking-wastewater wells -- especially those in which great volumes of water reach crystalline basement rock that lies close to a fault -- induce earthquakes that otherwise might not have happened for hundreds of years.

February 23, 2015 at 2:41 PM UTC

By Mary Duenwald

Mary Duenwald was an editor at Bloomberg Opinion and a member of the editorial board covering health care and the environment.

Oklahomans have enough trouble with tornadoes.
Photographer: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images

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Not so many years ago, earthquake science was no more relevant to Oklahoma than marine biology. But these days the state is shaking way more often than California, and giving many people there an unwanted crash course in seismology.

Last year, Oklahoma had 585 earthquakes with a magnitude 3.0 or greater (big enough for people to easily feel) -- almost three times as many as California had and up from an average of just two a year before 2009. Not coincidentally, that's when drillers began injecting wastewater from fracking and other oil-and-gas extraction operations into thousands of underground wells. In the past week alone, Oklahomans have felt the earth move eight times -- which is probably eight times more than nature intended them to. It's enough to get officials, even in a drilling-friendly state, to take action to manage wastewater wells.