Alaska Quake Raises Concerns About Oil Safety

A recent 7.5 earthquake off the coast of Alaska that could be felt as far away as Oregon raises concerns about the safety of deep water drilling operations. Aftershocks as high as 5.2 were reported. The quake, which hit Saturday evening, triggered tsunami warnings for hundreds of miles from Alaska to the northern tip of Vancouver, Canada; these warnings were later canceled. While there is not enough evidence as of Sunday evening to suggest that drilling caused this particular earthquake, it is possible to generate earthquakes through drilling.

In northeast Ohio last year, the Associated Press reported that a well used to dispose wastewater from oil and gas drilling “almost certainly” caused 11 minor earthquakes in that area, the biggest of which measured 4.0 on the Richter Scale. Injection wells have been suspected of causing quakes in Arkansas, Colorado, and Oklahoma.

The US Geological Survey says that while oil drilling can cause earthquakes, it cannot cause the kind that are reported in the news. That is because oil is found in soft and squishy sediments while most major earthquakes occur in hard rocky slabs that slide against each other, releasing tremendous amounts of energy.
But as oil reserves become exhausted and oil companies go deeper and deeper to get more oil, the risk is that there will be more pressure at greater depths. The farther down you drill, the higher the pressure you encounter. This increases the risk of a high-level earthquake as well as the risk of another BP tragedy; the oil is still seeping out of the BP well today in the Gulf Coast. This could cause massive economic and environmental damage and drive the price of gas even higher than the present $3 per gallon.

And the rush to drill for more oil could impact the quality of life. An April 2012 study by the US Geological Survey found that the frequency of earthquakes between Alabama and Montana from the 20th century to 2011 is sixfold; there were 134 such quakes in 2011. The study found that the cause was increased oil and gas drilling operations. This includes the New Madrid, MO fault line, which was the site of three successive earthquakes that were over 7.0 on the Richter Scale in 1811 and 1812 that could be felt as far away as Virginia.

At the same time of the Alaska quake, a Shell oil rig has run aground near Kodiak, Alaska and officials are in a quandary about how to remove it. Although the site of the recent Alaska quake and the oil disaster are hundreds of miles apart, Kodiak would have been in the path of a tsunami had one happened; that would have triggered a disaster bigger than the BP spill.