Jeremiah Shelor reports that a new study released Wednesday by scientists at the University of Texas at Austin (UT) adds to the growing body of research suggesting a link between seismicity and underground wastewater injection wells. The study, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Geophysical Research, Solid Earth, looked at a series of earthquakes near Timpson, TX, including a 4.8 magnitude earthquake that occurred May 17, 2012. Researchers built a computer model that simulated the effects of fluid injection on the stability of the fault suspected of generating the seismicity using a number of parameters, including the physical properties of the reservoir and the orientation of the fault.
The results found it to be plausible that two injection wells near Timpson caused the earthquakes, which began occurring in April 2008, around 17 months after the wells began operating. However, while earthquakes were generated using a certain range of input parameters, the modeling also found that no earthquakes were generated in simulations using a wider set of equally probable parameters, according to a summary of the study findings.
The use of a computer model differentiates the UT study from previous research that relied on the timing and proximity of underground injection activity to determine whether it had induced nearby seismic activity.While showing a potential link between underground injection and seismicity, the results also underscore the difficulty of conclusively tying specific earthquakes to human activity using currently available subsurface data, according to the researchers.
We used a more rigorous approach than previous studies, but our analyses are limited by the availability of robust, high-quality data sets that describe the conditions at depth at which water is injected and earthquakes occur, said Peter Eichhubl, a senior research scientist with UT Bureau of Economic Geology and a co-author of the study.
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