Updated on May 20 at 12:25 p.m.
SALEM, Ohio — A well pad in Noble County is standing on shaky ground after several consecutive earthquakes occurred, prompting the Ohio Department of Natural Resources to halt hydraulic fracturing operations at the pad.
ODNR linked the seismic events to oil and gas operations at Bears Pad conducted by Energy Acquisition Partners, operating as Encino Energy. The earthquakes took place on several days throughout the first week of May.
According to the Ohio Seismic Network, which monitors earthquake activity, the first seismic event was detected on April 29 at roughly 10 p.m. about 2 miles southeast of Pleasant City. It was a 2.8 magnitude earthquake and was reported by 33 people.
The second one occurred on May 2 at 6:43 a.m., detected about 2 miles southeast of Pleasant City. It was a 2.4 magnitude earthquake and twelve individuals reported the incident.
On May 6, a 2.3 magnitude earthquake was detected roughly 2 miles southeast of Pleasant City at 4 p.m. One individual reported the incident. The latest incident took place on May 8 at 11:13 p.m., roughly 2.5 miles southeast of Pleasant City. The network had 33 individuals report the earthquake, which was a magnitude of 3.2.
According to Karina Cheung, spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the agency responsible for overseeing fracking operations, “Some of these earthquakes which occurred in Noble County, slightly surpassed magnitudes strong enough to feel.”
ODNR’s Division of Oil and Gas Management previously worked with well operators at the pad to create a mitigation plan to reduce seismic activity and implemented monitoring requirements. But, the most recent activity prompted the agency to halt operations at the well pad until further notice.
“This location has not had any previously known seismicity,” Cheung told Farm and Dairy.
This isn’t the first time that earthquakes have been linked to fracking operations in Ohio, though. Between 2011-2012, 12 earthquakes occurred at the Northstar 1 Class II injection well in Youngstown, Ohio, the first starting only two weeks after companies started pumping fracking waste fluid into the ground.
The final earthquake had a magnitude of almost 4.0; ODNR subsequently shut down operations. Shortly after, the agency created its seismic section that monitors seismic activity in real-time across Ohio to determine whether seismic events are related to oil and gas operations.
The first earthquake to be linked to hydraulic fracturing in Ohio — and the second in the country — occurred in 2013 in Harrison County. The quakes were 2.0 magnitude or smaller, and took place at a depth of about 10,000 feet, nearly 2,000 feet below the Utica shale that was being fracked.
In 2014, a 3.0 magnitude earthquake was felt in Poland Township, Ohio as a result of hydraulic fracturing operations. Following the incident, University of Miami scientists studied the seismic activity in Poland Township and found that 77 earthquakes occurred, but only a couple were actually felt.
Most recently, in 2018, University of Miami scientists published a study that found a link between hydraulic fracturing and earthquakes by measuring earthquake patterns in eastern Ohio. The researchers found that while fracking activity occurs in shallow layers of Marcellus and Utica shale, operations can cause earthquakes in deeper, mature faults.
“The earthquakes we have been studying show patterns that indicate the operations are re-activating old faults instead of creating new ones,” said Miami geology professor Michael Brudzinski, co-author of the study.
“In most cases, the faults we are seeing re-activated have the same type of orientation that is aligned with the overall stress field in the Earth’s crust. We say these faults are ‘optimally oriented,’ and they should have the largest stresses placed on them naturally. This means they would be stressed to a critical point such that only small changes in conditions (like that from fluid injection) would cause them to move.”
(Liz Partsch can be reached at epartsch@farmanddairy.com or 330-337-3419.)
