Monday, April 14, 2014

Kasick is really protecting the people this time. Seismic monitors? That is a joke.

Can anyone tell who is cronies are?

Ohio is set to slap the oil and gas industry (click here) with more regulations, due to an alleged link between hydraulic fracturing near fault lines and increased earthquakes.

The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) said on Friday it would require drilling companies to install seismic monitors if they want to frack within three miles of a known fault line, or where an earthquake has already occurred. If the monitors detect a seismic event above a 1.0 magnitude, drilling operations must be stopped.

But the drilling pause doesn’t stop there. If the state determines there is a “probable connection” between fracking and the quake, oil and gas companies will not be able to complete their well site....

The favorite Republican rant that puts money before people is "We need more study."

Really? 

Well, looky thar. It is a published study in a respected journal. It wasn't just one or two or even three earthquakes. It was a whopping 157 earthquakes in a single year. That is called CONCLUSIVE EVIDENCE.

By John Upton
A single fracking wastewater well triggered 167 earthquakes in and around Youngstown, Ohio, during a single year of operation.
That’s according to a study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research by Won-Young Kim, a researcher at Columbia University. Earthquakes had never been recorded at Youngstown before 2010. Then, at the end of that year, frackers started pumping their waste from Marcellus Shale drilling projects into the 9,200-foot deep Northstar 1 injection well. Within two weeks, the area had experienced its first quake....

Journal of Geophysical Research: Solid Earth
Volume 118, Issue 7, pages 3506–3518, July 2013

There is a picture of Ohio. Plain as the nose on Kasich's face.

The image below is the record of seismic activity in magnitude measured in days after injection started. 

Now, there is no doubt and there is no need for further study. Governor Kasick is putting lives and property on the line and he simply doesn't care. Just that simple. He figures most Ohioans just fell off the back of a turnip truck and are as greedy as he and his cronies, too. So, everyone will just look the other way.

What is even more interesting is that the earthquakes are happening right next to the Pennsylvania border. There is at least one that drifted right over the Pennsylvania border.



Here is a few keywords for the Governor.

Keywords:
Induced earthquakes in Youngstown, Ohio
Migration of earthquakes
Injection volume triggered earthquakes

Abstract

Over 109 small earthquakes (Mw 0.4–3.9) were detected during January 2011 to February 2012 in the Youngstown, Ohio area, where there were no known earthquakes in the past. These shocks were close to a deep fluid injection well. The 14 month seismicity included six felt earthquakes and culminated with a Mw 3.9 shock on 31 December 2011. Among the 109 shocks, 12 events greater than Mw 1.8 were detected by regional network and accurately relocated, whereas 97 small earthquakes (0.4 < Mw  < 1.8) were detected by the waveform correlation detector. Accurately located earthquakes were along a subsurface fault trending ENE-WSW—consistent with the focal mechanism of the main shock and occurred at depths 3.5–4.0 km in the Precambrian basement. We conclude that the recent earthquakes in Youngstown, Ohio were induced by the fluid injection at a deep injection well due to increased pore pressure along the preexisting subsurface faults located close to the wellbore. We found that the seismicity initiated at the eastern end of the subsurface fault—close to the injection point, and migrated toward the west—away from the wellbore, indicating that the expanding high fluid pressure front increased the pore pressure along its path and progressively triggered the earthquakes. We observe that several periods of quiescence of seismicity follow the minima in injection volumes and pressure, which may indicate that the earthquakes were directly caused by the pressure buildup and stopped when pressure dropped.