‘There’s a seaside place they call Blackpool that’s famous for fresh air and fun’. Well, maybe, not any more. If you, dear weekender couples, lie still after the ‘fun’ the Earth may yet move for you. Not much, I’ll admit, for British fracking regulations permit Cuadrilla, who have a drill rig at nearby Preston New Road on the Fylde coastal plain of NW England, only to trigger earthquakes with a magnitude less than 0.5 on the Richter scale. This condition was applied after early drilling by Cuadrilla had stimulated earthquakes up to magnitude 3. To the glee of anti-fracking groups the magnitude 0.5 limit has been regularly exceeded, thereby thwarting Cuadrilla’s ambitions from time to time. Leaving aside the view of professional geologists that the pickings for fracked shale gas in Britain [June 2014] are meagre, the methods deployed in hydraulic fracturing of gas-prone shales do pose seismic risks. Geology, beneath the Fylde is about as simple as it gets in tectonically tortured Britain. There are no active faults, and no significant dormant ones near the surface that have moved since about 250 Ma ago; most of Britain is riven by major fault lines, some of which are occasionally active, especially in prospective shale-gas basins near the Pennines. When petroleum companies are bent on fracking they use a drilling technology that allows one site to sink several wells that bend with depth to travel almost horizontally through the target shale rock. A water-based fluid containing a mix of polymers and surfactants to make it slick, plus fine sand or ceramic particles, are pumped at very high pressures into the rock. Joints and bedding in the shale are thus forced open and maintained in that condition by the sandy material, so that gas and even light oil can accumulate and flow up the drill stems to the surface.

Shale, being dominated by ultra-fine clay minerals, is slippery when wet. Consequently, any elastic strain built-up in the rock, either by active tectonics or from long in the past, is likely to be released by fracking. The fractures that release the gas also facilitate the escape of formation water locked in the shale from when it was originally deposited. Being rich in organic matter, target shales maintain highly reducing chemical conditions. So as well as being salty, such formation water may contain high abundances of heavy metals and arsenic, unlike the groundwater in naturally permeable and oxygenated rocks, such as sandstones and limestones. Fracking carries a pollution risk too. Toxic waste fluid is generally disposed of by pumping into permeable strata beneath the well site. There is no knowing where such noxious water might go, other than to follow lines of least resistance, such as large joints and dormant faults that may well be unsuspected at the depths to which drilling might penetrate. That too poses seismic rick by lubrication of the pathways taken by the fluids.

Britain has barely been touched by fracking or conventional petroleum drilling, unlike large swathes of North America. Fracking began in Kansas, USA in 1947 but got underway in earnest in the 1970s to dominate US natural gas production since the 1990s. The effects of fracking in the long term [July 2013] show up in the active shale-gas basins there. Even in geological settings as quiescent as the Fylde seems to be, the picture is one of repeated earthquakes induced by fracking, which often exceed magnitude 3.0, including one of magnitude 5.6 in Oklahoma that destroyed 14 homes in 2016. A recent paper in Science examines how fluid migration induces dormant structures to move again (Bhattacharya, P. & Viesca, R.C. 2019. Fluid-induced aseismic fault slip outpaces pore-fluid migration. Science, v. 364, p. 464-468; DOI: 10.1126/science.aaw7354). The authors, from Tufts University in the US, used experimental fluid injection in France to indicate that aseismic slip resulting from fluid injection transmits stress far and wide, and more quickly than expected from the outward movement of the injected fluids. This explains why earthquakes produced by deliberate fluid injection into the crust often occur more frequently in active shale-gas basins than they do in areas of naturally high seismic activity

Related article: Fracking: Earthquakes are triggered well beyond fluid injection zones (Science News)