She was flying home from a holiday in Samoa when she saw it through the airplane window: a "peculiar large mass" floating on the ocean, hundreds of kilometres off the north coast of New Zealand.
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Toxic brine injections into the earth from oil and gas production cause earthquakes - but why?
New research published recently in the journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences explains that shallow wastewater injections from oil and gas production are the drivers of earthquakes, not deep wastewater injections. Wastewater injections consist of toxic brine, which is a byproduct of oil and gas production. Brine is often disposed of by injecting it back into the earth’s subsurface, which has been shown to trigger earthquakes.
The study comes from geoscientists at Virginia Tech who investigated the Delaware Basin in western Texas. This region is one of the most productive hydrocarbon fields in the United States and has also experienced wide-ranging seismicity. Asociate professor of geosciences Manoochehr Shirzaei and postdoctoral research scientist Guang Zhai, as well as Michael Manga, a professor and chair of Berkeley s Department of Earth and Planetary Science, led
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IMAGE: Manoochehr Shirzaei, an associate professor of geosciences at Virginia Tech. Photo by Steven Mackay. view more
Credit: Virginia Tech
In a newly published paper, Virginia Tech geoscientists have found that shallow wastewater injection not deep wastewater injections can drive widespread deep earthquake activity in unconventional oil and gas production fields.
Brine is a toxic wastewater byproduct of oil and gas production. Well drillers dispose of large quantities of brine by injecting it into subsurface formations, where its injection can cause earthquakes, according to Guang Zhai, a postdoctoral research scientist in the Department of Geosciences, part of the Virginia Tech College of Science, and a visiting assistant researcher at the University of California, Berkeley.