Although the US Geological Survey (USGS) indicates that there is no correlation between earthquakes and the exploration and extraction of oil, the physics involved seem to oppose this position. Oil and gas are the result of organic material under intense heat and pressure over a period of time. Oil’s abundance made it an ideal candidate early in our history for use. As time has passed and the demand continues to rise, these resources have been slowly depleted. It’s this cumulative effect on the land that was researched, and I will let the reader and this research speak for itself.
All the figures used below were retrieved from the USGS and the Energy Information Association (EIA), both government agencies responsible for documenting earthquakes and oil production.
Pascal’s law. In general, his law states that a liquid in a sealed container cannot be compressed and that pressure is exerted equally in all directions in this environment. This is how brakes and automatic transmissions work in cars and other vehicles. I could see how we would create problems for ourselves eventually if we remove enough water from the sublayers. Like walking next to the water by the beach compared to walking in the sand dunes, same soil, just absent of its moisture. As mines have demonstrated throughout history, the Earth wants to fill in voids beneath the surface due to the extreme pressures experienced as you travel deeper. But then I looked at the oil industry and saw something even more concerning. Could oil extraction, exploration, and forced injection used to maximize an oil field’s production cause earthquakes?
Oil production could have an influence on large-scale earthquakes over time, but are known to periodically produce small-scale tremors. Earthquakes work proportionately, meaning that a number of small earthquakes need to occur before a larger earthquake takes place. For example, there may be 100 level 3 earthquakes before one level 4, and 100 level 4 earthquakes to occur before one level 5 and so on. If oil production does indeed influence smallscale earthquakes, then mathematically, the probability of a large-scale earthquake must rise proportionately with it.
As we go back in time, there is more speculation, but both the monitoring and technology improves every year. I decided to use 1980 as a starting date, a time when every earthquake within these variables should have been detected. I took all the earthquakes in the world between the levels of 3.0 to 5.9 and graphed them out.
We seemed to have come to a time where we are now experiencing more earthquakes than ever before. There is credence that monitoring and population densities have increased awareness, but this does not account for the past 30 years. Many of the oil beds around the world have been consumed, and these are areas that would be considered safe to drill for oil because they are not along any fault lines. Today, with the reduction in these fields and greater demand, they are now expanding exploration in and around these tectonic plates, particularly of concern, the Caribbean and the Far East.
Since 1990, we can see a sharp increase in only 20 years—from less than 9,000 in the early 1990s up to nearly 25,000 today. Although it is known that drilling and extracting oil often produces earthquakes in the magnitude of 3 to 5, it has been noted that there is no significant rise in larger earthquakes around the world.
Earthquakes 6.0 and greater were less than 110 per year back in the early 80s and are now exceeding 160 a year. In this graph of earthquakes above 7.0, we can see that there were ten recorded earthquakes exceeding 7.0 or above in 1980 and now averaging over sixteen annually. In 2010, there were twenty-two.
Although many continue to speculate other causes or influences on today’s earthquakes, I decided to look at Alaska and graph this area out. This was virgin soil prior to 1957 and could be used as a good base model.
Logic tells me that extracting one barrel of oil from the ground will have a minimal effect, but extracting 100 barrels would have 100 times the effect. The effect is directly proportionate to the area of mass that lay above and around the oil and gas being extracted. Extracting these elements will cause pressure changes below the soil, causing a displacement. When extracted in or along fault lines, where a great amount of oil is found, there should be an anticipated increased effect resulting in earthquakes near these areas. Eventually, at some point, a precipice will be met when the amount will eventually have an effect that will destabilize the plates. If this is true, then we would expect to see production increasing faster than earthquakes, and where drilling subsides, we would expect to see earthquakes decrease slower than the production decreases, a delayed event.
Alaska Earthquakes And Oil Production 1981–2009 1981 Beginning of Production
Dashed line indicates oil production, solid line indicates earthquakes above 3.0
In 1964, the Great Alaska earthquake took place. Afterwards monitoring for earthquakes changed and is demonstrated by the graph’s numbers for that year. After 1972, the land became more fragile and susceptible to earthquakes, and there also seems to be some clear indicators that looking for oil also causes earthquakes, specifically 1971 and 1972 before the pipeline began. There is also a bump in the graph in 1957 when oil production first began and in the 1960s when they expanded exploration and extraction. As this graph indicates, increased earthquake activity occurred after the pipeline began and responded directly to production—specifically, the rise, fall, and rise again in both production and earthquakes from 1996 to 2002.
Oil production around the world has been on the rise except for one area, the lower 48 states. Oil production had been declining in the lower 48 year by year, and if this hypothesis is correct, then we should see a decline in earthquakes of 3.0 and above for the lower 48. Many oil wells were capped off and production drastically slowed up in the early 1990s due to the low cost of oil. Here are the results with the dashed line showing the average production while the solid line is the average trend of earthquakes since 1990. The lower 48 is the one area of the world where we can find a reduction in both earthquakes and oil production.
In this graph, we can clearly see the decline in earthquakes; the only large-scale area on the earth showing a reduction. This demonstration conforms to known physics and the results confirmed my expectations.
Since this time, there has been massive production coming from North Dakota that will be discussed later, but it is also clear that these levels of earthquakes have risen drastically in direct correlation to production. Further research will only confirm this. Understanding the physical properties at work, we can only expect more and greater earthquakes here in the lower 48. This is being accomplished in order to fuel the financial greed of a select few people who will ignore any responsibility or liability for their actions.
All the figures used below were retrieved from the USGS and the Energy Information Association (EIA), both government agencies responsible for documenting earthquakes and oil production.
Pascal’s law. In general, his law states that a liquid in a sealed container cannot be compressed and that pressure is exerted equally in all directions in this environment. This is how brakes and automatic transmissions work in cars and other vehicles. I could see how we would create problems for ourselves eventually if we remove enough water from the sublayers. Like walking next to the water by the beach compared to walking in the sand dunes, same soil, just absent of its moisture. As mines have demonstrated throughout history, the Earth wants to fill in voids beneath the surface due to the extreme pressures experienced as you travel deeper. But then I looked at the oil industry and saw something even more concerning. Could oil extraction, exploration, and forced injection used to maximize an oil field’s production cause earthquakes?
Oil production could have an influence on large-scale earthquakes over time, but are known to periodically produce small-scale tremors. Earthquakes work proportionately, meaning that a number of small earthquakes need to occur before a larger earthquake takes place. For example, there may be 100 level 3 earthquakes before one level 4, and 100 level 4 earthquakes to occur before one level 5 and so on. If oil production does indeed influence smallscale earthquakes, then mathematically, the probability of a large-scale earthquake must rise proportionately with it.
As we go back in time, there is more speculation, but both the monitoring and technology improves every year. I decided to use 1980 as a starting date, a time when every earthquake within these variables should have been detected. I took all the earthquakes in the world between the levels of 3.0 to 5.9 and graphed them out.
We seemed to have come to a time where we are now experiencing more earthquakes than ever before. There is credence that monitoring and population densities have increased awareness, but this does not account for the past 30 years. Many of the oil beds around the world have been consumed, and these are areas that would be considered safe to drill for oil because they are not along any fault lines. Today, with the reduction in these fields and greater demand, they are now expanding exploration in and around these tectonic plates, particularly of concern, the Caribbean and the Far East.
Since 1990, we can see a sharp increase in only 20 years—from less than 9,000 in the early 1990s up to nearly 25,000 today. Although it is known that drilling and extracting oil often produces earthquakes in the magnitude of 3 to 5, it has been noted that there is no significant rise in larger earthquakes around the world.
Earthquakes 6.0 and greater were less than 110 per year back in the early 80s and are now exceeding 160 a year. In this graph of earthquakes above 7.0, we can see that there were ten recorded earthquakes exceeding 7.0 or above in 1980 and now averaging over sixteen annually. In 2010, there were twenty-two.
Although many continue to speculate other causes or influences on today’s earthquakes, I decided to look at Alaska and graph this area out. This was virgin soil prior to 1957 and could be used as a good base model.
Logic tells me that extracting one barrel of oil from the ground will have a minimal effect, but extracting 100 barrels would have 100 times the effect. The effect is directly proportionate to the area of mass that lay above and around the oil and gas being extracted. Extracting these elements will cause pressure changes below the soil, causing a displacement. When extracted in or along fault lines, where a great amount of oil is found, there should be an anticipated increased effect resulting in earthquakes near these areas. Eventually, at some point, a precipice will be met when the amount will eventually have an effect that will destabilize the plates. If this is true, then we would expect to see production increasing faster than earthquakes, and where drilling subsides, we would expect to see earthquakes decrease slower than the production decreases, a delayed event.
Alaska Earthquakes And Oil Production 1981–2009 1981 Beginning of Production
Dashed line indicates oil production, solid line indicates earthquakes above 3.0
In 1964, the Great Alaska earthquake took place. Afterwards monitoring for earthquakes changed and is demonstrated by the graph’s numbers for that year. After 1972, the land became more fragile and susceptible to earthquakes, and there also seems to be some clear indicators that looking for oil also causes earthquakes, specifically 1971 and 1972 before the pipeline began. There is also a bump in the graph in 1957 when oil production first began and in the 1960s when they expanded exploration and extraction. As this graph indicates, increased earthquake activity occurred after the pipeline began and responded directly to production—specifically, the rise, fall, and rise again in both production and earthquakes from 1996 to 2002.
Oil production around the world has been on the rise except for one area, the lower 48 states. Oil production had been declining in the lower 48 year by year, and if this hypothesis is correct, then we should see a decline in earthquakes of 3.0 and above for the lower 48. Many oil wells were capped off and production drastically slowed up in the early 1990s due to the low cost of oil. Here are the results with the dashed line showing the average production while the solid line is the average trend of earthquakes since 1990. The lower 48 is the one area of the world where we can find a reduction in both earthquakes and oil production.
In this graph, we can clearly see the decline in earthquakes; the only large-scale area on the earth showing a reduction. This demonstration conforms to known physics and the results confirmed my expectations.
Since this time, there has been massive production coming from North Dakota that will be discussed later, but it is also clear that these levels of earthquakes have risen drastically in direct correlation to production. Further research will only confirm this. Understanding the physical properties at work, we can only expect more and greater earthquakes here in the lower 48. This is being accomplished in order to fuel the financial greed of a select few people who will ignore any responsibility or liability for their actions.