Seismic research underway in Texas amid temblors
DEL RIO, Texas — The state of Texas wants to stick a seismometer on Terry Hill’s ranch, right next to his deer blind.
The Houston Chronicle reports Hill, a fourth generation Texan born and raised in this Rio Grande outpost, understands the significance.
He receives a few thousand dollars in oil and gas royalties a year, yet the findings of the earthquake sensor could dramatically alter the industry that helps pay his bills.
“I don’t know what this is, or what it’s gonna do,” said Hill, 66, “but I hope it will be helpful.”
Hill is among the landowners allowing the state to piece together one of the largest networks of seismometers in the United States with the aim of settling a debate that has wide implications for the future of fossil fuels.
The network, stretching from New Mexico to Louisiana, Oklahoma to the Gulf, will collect data that may determine whether modern oil and gas production is responsible for an exponential rise in the number earthquakes in Texas and other energy producing states.
Scientists say it’s clear there’s a connection: Oil and gas operations pump billions of barrels of water deep into the earth every year, pressuring faults underground.
Politicians, industry leaders and officials of the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, have steadfastly argued that there is little proof, if any, of such a tie.
Texas Railroad Commissioner Ryan Sitton called suggestions that oil and gas operations cause earthquakes “a bunch of suppositions, barely even hypotheses.”
“The scientist in me hesitates to make any statements that sound conclusive until we have more tests and results to back these up,” said Sitton, a mechanical engineer who founded the Pasadenabased oil and gas consultancy Pinnacle Advanced Reliability Technologies.
But nearly everyone agrees that getting those results is critical. Texas airports, hospitals and highways weren’t built to withstand earthquakes. And if scientists find that oil and gas operations are indeed causing them, regulators could be forced to curtail key activities in the industry.
Companies would have to adapt, at a cost of untold millions of dollars, with repercussions echoing into oil fields nationwide. The state Legislature has appropriated $4.5 million, with the oil and gas industry contributing another $1.2 million, to support research seeking to answer why tremors, which shook the state barely once a year for more than a century, now arrive by the dozens.
Over the past 18 months, the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas, which is leading the project, has purchased equipment, hired staff, gathered industry experts, and charted a course for 55 additional seismometers, triple the number currently installed in Texas.
“The oil and gas companies realize that they need to be part of this solution,” said Ellen Rathje, a civil engineering professor at UT and a principal researcher on the project. “They need to understand it better. Because there’s a connection.”