MARCH 30, 2015
In November 2013, Austin Holland, Oklahoma’s state
seismologist, got a request that made him nervous. It was from David Boren,
president of the University of Oklahoma, which houses the Oklahoma Geological
Survey where Holland works. Boren, a former U.S. senator, asked Holland to his
office for coffee with Harold Hamm, the billionaire founder of Continental
Resources, one of Oklahoma’s largest oil and gas operators. Boren sits on the
board of Continental, and Hamm is a big donor to the university, giving $20
million in 2011 for a new diabetes center. Says Holland: “It was just a little
bit intimidating.”
Holland had been studying possible links between a rise in
seismic activity in Oklahoma and the rapid increase in oil and gas production, the
state’s largest industry. During the meeting, Hamm requested that Holland be
careful when publicly discussing the possible connection between oil and gas
operations and a big jump in the number of earthquakes, which geological
researchers were increasingly tying to the underground disposal of oil and gas
wastewater, a byproduct of the fracking boom that Continental has helped
pioneer. “It was an expression of concern,” Holland recalls.
Details surrounding that meeting and others have emerged in
recent weeks as e-mails from the Oklahoma Geological Survey have been released
through public records requests filed by Bloomberg and other media outlets,
including EnergyWire, which first reported the Hamm meeting.
The e-mails suggest a steady stream of industry pressure on
scientists at the state office. But oil companies say there’s nothing wrong
with contact between executives and scientists. “The insinuation that there was
something untoward that occurred in those meetings is both offensive and
inaccurate,” says Continental Resources spokeswoman Kristin Thomas. “Upon its
founding, the Oklahoma Geological Survey had a solid reputation of an agency
that was accessible and of service to the community and industry in Oklahoma.
We hope that the agency can continue the legacy to provide this service.”
Likewise, Boren says such conversations are harmless. “The
meeting with Harold Hamm was purely informational,” the university president
said in a statement on March 27. “Mr. Hamm is a very reputable producer and
wanted to know if Mr. Holland had found any information which might be helpful
to producers in adopting best practices that would help prevent any possible
connection between drilling and seismic events. In addition, he wanted to make
sure that the Survey (OGS) had the benefit of research by Continental
geologists.” Boren is on the board of The Bloomberg Family
Foundation, founded by Michael Bloomberg, the owner of Bloomberg LP.
Before Holland became the state seismologist in 2010, there
wasn’t much for Big Oil and state researchers to argue about. Over the previous
30 years, Oklahoma had averaged fewer than two earthquakes a year of at
least 3.0 in magnitude. In 2015 the state is on pace for 875, according to
Holland. Oklahoma passed California last year as the most seismically active
state in the continental U.S.
One significant change in drilling practices is
contemporaneous with the increase in seismic activity: horizontal hydraulic
fracturing. Fracking has been around for decades, but technological advances
have allowed companies to drill sideways, injecting a high-pressure mix of
water, mud, and sand into shale formations deep underground, creating access to
previously unreachable pockets of oil and gas. Oil production in Oklahoma has
more than doubled over the past decade, creating new wealth for the state as
well as an unwanted surplus. Horizontal wells can produce as much as nine or 10
barrels of salty, toxin-laced water for every barrel of oil. Much of that fluid
is injected back underground into wastewater disposal wells. It’s this water, injected
near faults, that many seismologists—including those at the U.S. Geological
Survey—say has caused the spike in earthquakes.
The rise of fracking has coincided with Oklahoma passing
California as the most seismically active state in the continental U.S.
The Hamm and Boren meeting wasn’t the only such
informational session. In an e-mail from October 2013, Holland updated his
superiors on a meeting he had in the office of Patrice Douglas, then one of the
three elected members of the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, which regulates
that state’s oil and gas companies. Also at the meeting was Jack Stark,
then-senior vice president for exploration at Continental and now its
president. “The basic jist [sic] of the meeting is that Continental does not
feel induced seismicity is an issue and they are nervous about any dialog about
the subject,” wrote Holland. He also wrote that Continental and Douglas were
concerned about his participation in a joint statement he’d recently signed
with the U.S. Geological Survey suggesting a link between quakes and the oil
industry.
As Oklahoma has become the capital of American seismic
activity, scientists, citizens, and some state lawmakers have been critical of
state officials for their perceived slowness in drawing a connection between
earthquakes and oil and gas activities, which account for 1 in 5 jobs
in the state. Over the past couple years, as research began to get published
and many seismologists became convinced that earthquakes were being induced by
wastewater disposal, the OGS remained on the fence. In early 2013 the academic
journal Geology accepted a paper attributing a 5.6 magnitude quake that hit
Oklahoma in 2011 to underground changes resulting from wastewater disposal
wells. In March 2013, OGS put out its own statement, attributing the
quake to “natural causes.” And in February 2014, three months after
Holland’s meeting with Hamm, the agency released a statement playing down the
role of industry, saying the “majority, but not all, of the recent earthquakes
appear to be the result of natural stresses.”
“This is a conflict of interest that we never before
could’ve imagined,” says Jason Murphey, a Republican state representative from
Logan County, which has been one of the most seismically active areas in the
state over the past year. “When Boren facilitates that meeting, it sends a
message to Austin Holland.”
Even when earthquakes appeared strongly correlated to
wastewater injection, OGS has been reluctant to discuss a connection. In
September 2013 a new disposal well was turned on in Love County in southern
Oklahoma. Soon, quakes began to jolt the area, sometimes several a
day.
The well reached its peak daily injection of more than 9,000
barrels of wastewater on Sept. 20, 2013. Three days later the area experienced
a magnitude 3.4 quake, moving furniture inside homes and knocking down a
chimney. Injection at the well was curtailed, then stopped altogether. The
seismic activity dipped almost immediately.
Still, the OGS hesitated to link the two. “We cannot rule
out that this observation could be simply a coincidence,” Holland wrote in a
report a week later. In early October, Holland spoke at a town hall meeting in
Love County, where he again said no conclusions could be drawn about the cause
of the quakes.
Many residents were frustrated by the lack of answers. But
ExxonMobil geologist Michael Sweatt wrote in an e-mail to Holland: “I would
like to congratulate you on a job well done at the Town Hall meeting in Love
County. I believe you delivered an unbiased report on the recent earthquake
activity and answered the residents’ questions the best you could.”
Today, as the number of earthquakes continues to soar,
Holland has evolved in his position. He recently told Bloomberg that the vast
majority of the increase in earthquakes is due to the injection of oil and gas
wastewater. Yet he bristles at any suggestion that industry pressure slowed him
from reaching that conclusion. Oklahoma has naturally occurring earthquakes, he
says, and there have been large spikes of natural earthquakes in the past where
no oil and gas development was occurring. It was proper, Holland says, to start
with the hypothesis that the quakes were not man-made. “Science doesn’t operate
in beliefs,” he says. “It operates in demonstrable facts.”
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com
