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abrazensunset | 4 years ago

It's worth noting that hydraulic fracturing itself is rarely the problem. Issues come from moving fluid volumes somewhere else during production: subsidence due to extraction from the place where the hydrocarbons are, or (most often) from injecting produced water into disposal wells, eventually triggering faults. Some of that produced water was introduced by the operations, but most of it was just in the ground with the oil & gas being produced.

It's possible to directly trigger small faults with while fracturing the rock, or to do something stupid like fracture into a freshwater zone other people are using, but that's not what's driving quakes in e.g. Oklahoma.

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