09/01/2017
I am so sorry to see the magazine of the organization founded by such an eminent scientist, Alexander Graham Bell, publish an article that is such a blatant exaggeration of the truth and so full of total untruths. I speak as a geophysicists with a master's degree from the Pennsylvania State University in geophysics +24 hours of graduate studies at Tulsa University in geophysics and mathematics +12 years in the research department at Amoco production company and another 20 years in technical leadership and Amoco's operational divisions plus another 12 years of consulting projects in China, Trinidad, Bangladesh, and Louisiana. I know a thing or 2 about a thing or 2 about faults, the effects of water injection, the technology of fracking and its effect on rocks, the physics of rocks, and etc. The article seems to imply that fracking is the cause of all the earthquakes in Oklahoma. He injects a little bit of water that might go a few hundred feet away from the borehole and if the borehole happened intersect at fault I can see that there might be some interaction at would be very unusual that the geologist would allow that to happen. What the writer of the article is confusing is that conventional production from vertical holes of which there are thousands, produces vast quantities of water along with the oil, and that water must be disposed of because it is toxic, and it is being disposed of by injecting it into a particular horizon in the Oklahoma area. That horizon in Oklahoma happens to be a highly fractured basement. This is unique to Oklahoma and other states such as Louisiana and Texas who are injecting large quantities of water into a variety of shallow sands that are not fractured are not suffering from earthquakes. Another really gross statement by the author is that he says that in Oklahoma they are injecting the water into the core of the earth and increasing the pressure in the core of the earth! Now that would be really serious would it not! Now I have not read the book so don't get me wrong, I am not criticizing the book because I haven't read it but I am criticizing the author of this paper because he has read it and totally misunderstood it and yet he thought that he had the wherewithal to write about it and make a total mess of it and what's worse make a 3 ring circus out of it. This kind of journalism has got to stop.
We still don't know where all the faults lie.
