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Another quake lab amid gas boom

Colorado incident follows Oklahoma

DENVER (AP) – From the living room chair where he sat reading around half past 9 on a May evening, Ron Baker heard the boom and felt his century-old Greeley farmhouse shudder, sending a menagerie of plastic horses toppling from a bedroom shelf.

He stepped out the back door and aimed a flashlight at the thick, ancient cottonwood that leans over the roof, expecting to reveal a snapped limb as the culprit. But he circled the house and found nothing amiss.

A few miles away in the city, Gail Jackson joined neighbors spilling out into the street, wondering if a plane crash had triggered the big bang and sudden vibration that dissipated as quickly as it arrived.

All over, phones rang and neighbors compared notes as the mystery unraveled: Weld County had felt the tremors of a magnitude-3.2 earthquake – jarring but accompanied by little, if any, damage.

In an area peppered with wells pulling energy resources from below ground – and many pumping wastewater from the process back into it through injection wells – an old question resurfaced: Could the same geological tinkering that has revved a formidable economic engine also trigger potentially damaging earthquakes?

“I knew there had been speculation around injection wells causing seismic activity,” Baker says. “This sort of confirmed what I’d been reading.”

Speculation has turned to full-on investigation as researchers from the University of Colorado jumped at the chance to gather data – and within days, had set up a network of seismometers surrounding the estimated epicenter.

State regulators eventually zeroed in on one high-volume injection well and had its operator shut off the flow for 3½ weeks before resuming activity on a gradual basis, while the CU scientists track seismic activity nearby.

The unexpected opportunity revives the concept of “induced seismicity” explored in Denver more than half a century ago at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal chemical weapons plant and then in gas and oil fields of western Colorado into the 1970s.

The Bureau of Reclamation has tracked induced seismicity since the 1990s in a river desalination project in the Paradox Valley, but the issue largely slipped under the radar until the industry boom of the past several years.

The Greeley quake, in a region not known for extensive seismic activity, came on the heels of research out of Oklahoma, a state also undergoing intensive gas and oil extraction and wastewater injection.

But while interest has ramped up in Colorado and elsewhere, the issue remains far from settled. The wells, long regarded as an environmentally responsible way to dispose of wastewater, have pierced the landscape for years, mostly without seismic drama.

And so industry officials and others express skepticism about any link, even as they cooperate, to varying degrees, with researchers. Meanwhile, 334 disposal injection wells in Colorado pump wastewater deep underground, with companies currently seeking approval for 35 more.



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