The Malaysian Insider :: Features
The Malaysian Insider :: Features |
| Fracking brought a boom, jobs and new businesses… and then the earth shook Posted: 27 Aug 2013 05:30 AM PDT In 2010 and 2011, the quiet farming town of Greenbrier, Arkansas, was rattled by a swarm of more than 1,000 minor earthquakes. The biggest, with a magnitude of 4.7, had its epicenter less than 450 metres from Davis's front porch. "This should not be happening in Greenbrier," Davis recalls thinking. He said the shaking damaged the support beams under an addition to his home. Then came another surprise: University of Memphis and Arkansas Geological Survey scientists said the quakes were likely triggered by the disposal of waste water from hydraulic fracturing – commonly known as fracking – into deep, underground wells. That finding prompted regulators from the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission to order several wells in the area shut down, and the earthquakes soon subsided. It also prompted Davis and more than a dozen of his neighbours to file five lawsuits in federal court against Chesapeake Operating Inc, as the owner in 2010 of two injection wells near Davis' home, and BHP Billiton, which purchased Chesapeake's shale gas assets in 2011. Another company, Clarita Operating LLC, owned a third well that was shut down, but the company went bankrupt and was dropped from the litigation in 2011. Chesapeake and BHP both declined to comment, citing policies not to discuss ongoing litigation. In court documents they denied they were responsible for the quakes and for any damage the quakes may have caused. The litigation marks the first legal effort to link earthquakes to waste water injection wells, according to a search of the Westlaw database and interviews with legal experts, and the first attempt to win compensation from drilling companies for quake damage. If any of the earthquake cases make it to a jury and the plaintiffs prevail, the outcome could spark additional litigation, since waste water injection wells are used not only in fracking, but in other kinds of oil and gas drilling and geothermal energy production. "The scientific community is really focusing on this issue so I imagine we will see more cases because of that," said Barclay Nicholson, a Houston lawyer who represents major oil and gas companies and is not involved in the Arkansas cases. "That's one of the new battlegrounds." The first of the suits, filed in US District Court in Eastern Arkansas, is scheduled to go to trial before Judge J Leon Holmes next March, though the parties have been engaged in settlement talks, according to the court docket. The Arkansas Independent Producers & Royalty Owners, an oil and gas industry group, acknowledges that scientists found a possible connection between the disposal wells and the spate of minor quakes in and around Greenbrier. But J Kelly Robbins, the group's executive vice president, said the companies had no way of knowing of any such link before waste water injection began, and he said the operators shut the wells down when questions were raised. "The appropriate state agencies stepped up, collected data, did what they were supposed to do and made a decision," Robbins said in an interview. "Industry abided by that and those wells were closed." Robbins also said that while Arkansas is a traditional oil and gas producing state, fracking in the Fayetteville shale had brought billions of dollars of investment and boosted the state's natural gas production ninefold in seven years. The earthquake cases are part of a wave of litigation that has followed the rapid expansion in natural gas production across the United States using fracking, a drilling process that deploys a highly pressurised mix of water and chemicals to break apart shale rock to release oil and gas. Since 2009, some 40 civil suits related to fracking have been filed in eight states, claiming harm ranging from groundwater contamination to air pollution to excessive noise. So far none of the lawsuits has made it to trial and about half have been dismissed or settled, with company lawyers mainly arguing that a link between fracking and contaminated groundwater or other environmental problems has not been proven, according to a Reuters analysis of legal filings. The US Environmental Protection Agency is expected to issue a major report on fracking and drinking water next year that could have an impact on these cases, lawyers closely following the litigation say. The Arkansas litigation does not target fracking itself, but rather the disposal of the leftover toxic, briny water known as "flowback." Millions of gallons of waste water are typically trucked from the fracking site to the well site, where they are injected thousands of feet underground into porous rock layers, often for weeks or months at a time. Seismologists say fracking can cause tiny "micro earthquakes" that are rarely felt on the surface. The process of disposing of the wastewater, though, can trigger slightly larger quakes when water is pumped near an already stressed fault, even one that hasn't moved in millions of years, according to the US Geological Survey. Only a handful of the 30,000 injection wells across the country have been suspected of causing earthquakes, the US Geological Survey has said. That rare event likely happened in central Arkansas, said Scott Ausbrooks, a geologist at the Arkansas Geological Survey in Little Rock who lives in Greenbrier and said he received calls from panicked neighbours when the quakes were rattling the town more than a dozen times a day. Ausbrooks said he became interested in studying wastewater injection in the area because it had previously experienced some earthquakes, including a notable swarm in the 1980s. He worked with Steve Horton from the University of Memphis Center for Earthquake Research and Information to set up seismic monitors around eight disposal wells. They found that 98 percent of the 2010-11 swarm of small quakes occurred within 6km of two of the wells. "Given the strong spatial and temporal correlation between the two wells and seismic activity on the fault," Horton wrote in a study published in Seismological Research Letters in the March/April 2012 issue, "it would be an extraordinary coincidence if the recent earthquakes were not triggered by the fluid injection. For these reasons, I conclude that fluid injection triggered the recent seismicity." It was only after the waste water injection wells went online that scientists discovered a previously unknown fault, now called the Guy-Greenbrier fault, Ausbrooks and Horton said. The Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission declared a permanent moratorium on new injection wells in almost 3,100 sq km around the newly discovered fault. The commission now requires new wells to be between 1.6 km and 8 km from known faults, and it more closely monitors the amount and pressure of injected waste water. The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) currently has no regulations relating to earthquakes and disposal wells – known as Class II wells – but the agency began working on a report addressing the issue in the wake of a spike in quakes in the central and eastern United States. In a November 2012 draft report, the EPA said it was studying "injection-induced seismicity" in central Arkansas, north Texas, Braxton County in West Virginia and Youngstown, Ohio. In Texas, operators in 2009 voluntarily plugged two disposal sites after regulators started investigating whether the wells touched off several quakes around the Dallas Forth-Fort Worth International Airport. Virginia's Department of Environmental Protection in 2010 reduced the rate of waste water injection allowed after a series of small tremors. And in Ohio, officials shut down five injection wells in Youngstown following a 4.0 earthquake on New Year's Eve 2011 in an area that had never experienced seismic activity before, the EPA report said. The EPA said the draft, obtained by the specialised news service EnergyWire through a Freedom of Information Act request, was a "technical report" as opposed to a policy blueprint and "is still under development." While the federal regulatory process plays out, the relationship between injection wells and earthquakes could first be thrashed out in court. Defence lawyers say proving negligence could be a difficult hurdle. "You have to prove that the conduct was unreasonable," said Thomas Daily, an Arkansas lawyer who represents energy firms and is not involved in the earthquake cases. "You are not liable for a bolt out of the blue." The plaintiffs' attorneys, from the Little Rock firm Emerson Poynter, claim the companies should have known the risks of drilling in a historically seismic area. "The scientific proof is absolutely there," said plaintiffs' lawyer Scott Poynter. Emerson Poynter lawyers said they currently represent 35 homeowners, about half of whom have yet to file lawsuits but plan to do so in state court. Along US highway Route 65, which cuts through Greenbrier, the firm sprung for a billboard that features an illustration of a cracked brick wall next to the caption, "Earthquake damage?" written in a shaky looking font. The firm's phone number is at the top. No matter how many people sign on, state regulators said the lawsuits will not deter oil and gas drilling. "It's something that happened, we addressed it and developed some rules to keep it from happening again and everyone has moved on," said Lawrence Bengal, director of the Arkansas Oil and Gas Commission. "Whether the past will result in some award of money to someone I really don't know. But I don't know what more could have been done." - Reuters, August 27, 2013. |
| Career first, children later: Taiwan women put their eggs on ice Posted: 26 Aug 2013 09:44 PM PDT Women play a big part in Taiwan's workforce, trailing only New Zealand and Australia for female employment among 14 countries in Asia, a recent report by MasterCard showed. A slowdown in the economy has made job security an even more pressing priority. That has been a factor in pushing the East Asian island's average marriage age to 30 these days, from 24 in the 1980s, and in driving the interest in egg freezing. "I was not sure when my ovaries would start degenerating but I was sure that I would probably marry late and I was sure that I wanted to become a mother," said Linn Kuo, 34, who chose to freeze her eggs three years ago. Kuo, a manager at Cisco System Taiwan Ltd, has a well-paid job that allows her to work from home. While her career has had a smooth trajectory, Kuo said she has not been as lucky in her love live. After her mother died, she realised the importance of having the support of children in later life. "I already had my conclusion," she said. "So I did some research and decided to freeze my eggs." Lai Hsing-hua, the clinic director at e-Stork Reproduction Centre in the city of Hsinchu, said he realised the need for egg-freezing services when many patients asked for egg donors after a late marriage. "We thought if they had frozen their eggs earlier, maybe they wouldn't need to use donated eggs," he said. "That's why we combined in-vitro fertilisation with the idea of prevention - prevent them from using others' eggs after their fertility has deteriorated." The clinic now gets more than 100 phone calls a month asking about egg freezing. Five years ago, it did just 20 of the procedures. It handled more than 70 cases in 2011, more than 50 last year and already more than 40 in the first six months of this year. The technology has matured and the embryo now has a high survival rate with egg freezing, Lai said. The service costs around 80,000 Taiwan dollars (RM8,890) and the whole process of retrieving the egg takes about 20 minutes. Chen Fen-ling, a professor of social work at National Taipei University, said societal pressures were causing women to delay marrying and starting a family. "Married women are like candles burning at both ends," she said. "We say that women work two jobs. They make money with a daytime job but, when they go back home, they take care of their children and parents-in-law. This pressure often makes women hesitate when making the decision about marriage." Those realities about career, marriage and motherhood are reflected in a woefully low birth-rate. Taiwan is tied with Hong Kong in third-last place globally in terms of the average number of children born per woman, just above Macau and Singapore, the CIA World Factbook says. - Reuters, August 27, 2013. |
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