WashPo Frack Attack: The Downside To Energy Innovation
Oklahoma earthquakes highlight an inconvenient truth about innovation
By Dominic Basulto
The current debate that Oklahoma is having over the potential link between hydraulic fracturing and the unprecedented spike in earthquake activity in recent months offers a warning lesson: every innovation comes with tradeoffs. In this case, the reward of cheaper, more bountiful energy promised by hydraulic fracturing appears to be offset by the risk of increased seismic activity. When it comes to innovation, there is no such thing as a free lunch.
While the oil and gas industry rejects any suggestion that fracking might be the root cause of Oklahoma’s earthquake spike, it’s hard to ignore that something very strange is happening in Oklahoma. Over a fifteen-month period from 2010 to 2011, there were 850 earthquakes in Oklahoma – compared to just six in the entire period from 2000 to 2008. Through May of this year, Oklahoma had already experienced 145 earthquakes of magnitude 3.0 or higher – an all-time record. As if to punctuate that point, this weekend saw another four earthquakes, all of them magnitude 3.0 or higher, and geological experts warned in May that a “damaging one” – bigger than the 5.6 quake in 2011 — is on the way.
If you look at a map of seismic activity, the strangeness is only compounded. You would expect earthquakes in regions near fault lines or plate lines – such as California or regions of Mexico and the Caribbean – but why Oklahoma? When a region without any history of earthquakes suddenly becomes afflicted by earthquakes, that’s odd.