The sad irony of this development, is that if the release of methane into the air surpasses the …show more content…
They say that the quakes can be induced in two ways: one by the pressure as the fracking occurred, and two, for a time after the process was completed, by pressure changes brought on by the lingering presence of fracking fluid. Dr. Eaton and Xuewei Bao also suggest that most of the recent earthquakes in Oklahoma and other parts of the United States have been caused by the burial of wastewater from all kinds of oil and gas wells rather than by the fracking process itself. Wastewater is injected under pressure into disposal wells drilled into a sandstone or other permeable formation and flows into the rock. That can cause pressure changes in the formation that can upset the equilibrium around a fault zone, causing fault slips resulting in an