Dr. Shemin Ge, the 2016 Geological Society of America’s Birdsall-Dreiss Lecturer, visited Syracuse University on March 22, 2016.  Dr. Ge is currently a professor at the University of Colorado-Boulder in the Geological Sciences Department.  During her visit, Dr. Ge spoke with Earth Sciences and Engineering faculty and students, and her visit culminated with her talk entitled “Fluid-Induced Seismicity – a pore pressure perspective.”  Dr. Ge explained how earthquakes can be induced by human activities, such as fluid extraction and injection, enhanced oil recovery, and hydraulic fracturing.  Her research on the increase in earthquake frequency in the U.S., which is caused by high rates of deep wastewater injection for waste disposal and enhanced oil recovery, was featured in the journal Science in 2015. In this study, earthquakes within 15 km of a wastewater injection well were considered to be spatially associated with the earthquake.  Dr. Ge and her colleagues also considered earthquakes to be temporally associated with injection wells if active wastewater or fluid injection was occurring at the time of the earthquake.

Dr. Ge and her colleagues concluded that the frequency of earthquakes not associated with injection wells has remained relatively constant (approximately 10-25 earthquakes per year) while the frequency of those associated with injection wells has increased by orders of magnitude in recent decades (ranging from a few earthquakes per year in the 1970s to >650 in 2014). Approximately 85% of associated earthquakes have occurred in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Texas. Dr. Ge and colleagues also concluded that high rate injection is a major contributing factor in high pore pressure generation, which may result in a higher likelihood of earthquake occurrence. This work can guide oil and gas industries and regulatory agencies to decrease the likelihood of earthquakes associated with injection wells in the future.

News article submitted by Sara Alesi, Kakonkwe Christian, Robin Glas, and Nicole Ng