I’ve looked at a list (perhaps incomplete) of what is being used in fracking fluids.  I wouldn’t consider those chemicals worse than the carboniferous deposits they are being used to mobilize.  To call it “injecting groundwater with carcinogens” is misleading.  Fracking is done thousands of feet below the aquifers.  Contamination of ground water is contamination by “natural” things that have been there for eons.  Fracking is just a big fucking water hammer.  I think the chemicals used in the water are far less important than the geological effects and the chemicals released from the rocks.

Being able to light a water tap is an indication of released hydrocarbon contamination rather than contamination by fracking fluids.  Most of the list of chemicals used are not flammable.

Gas blow-back and the uncontrolled release of methane is a real concern.

Disposal and treatment of fracking water is also a real concern.

Heavy equipment destroying roads is real.

Clearing land for fracking is NOTHING compared to mountain top removal.  Please check google maps of eastern Kentucky and West Virginia.  Those light gray areas are dead areas that used to be vibrant, green ecosystems.  Read “Lost Mountain” if you think the immediate effects of fracking are bad.

Not sure if proper paperwork is being done…

This result might have interesting consequences for San Andreas, at some point San Francisco is going to have another big one. Perhaps a regular series of little ones would be a better plan.

Releasing energy through small human-induced earthquakes is an idea that seismologists have considered and continue to consider. The theory is sound. This is how earthquakes work – pressure is built up along the fault and then released. It can happen catastrophically if built up over a long period of time, or it can happen mildly if it releases more frequently. You can see this varying style of seismicity at various points along the San Andreas, not to mention the thousands of other faults that all act differently around the world.

The problem is not that the idea of creating small earthquakes to relieve that pressure is misinformed or illogical. @bcsizemo:disqus and @wysinwyg:disqus are right here, it’s all about unintended consequences. Even in the most highly-studied areas of major seismic activity and faulting (such as Southern California, where I studied this stuff in grad school) the details of how everything works are really quite unknown.

I won’t get into the details but the point is that the idea of releasing pressure along faults is (IMO) a good one, but we’re far from the point of understanding things well enough in order to actually try it.

The unfortunate thing is that we will probably need to see a major, devastating earthquake in SoCal before truly understanding. The data from that event will provide most of what we need to know in order to try things like creating small earthquakes to relieve pressure.

Working to make sure that companies pay the full costs of the entire process, including covering future lawsuits due to damage to the environment, would make producing cheap natural gas too expensive to bother with.

Gotta hit ‘em in the pocketbook.

Fracking, by driving the cost of methane down, very effectively prevents the creation of a distributed, sustainable domestic biogas industry.  Now, I’m not an expert on the Chicago School, Randian Fuckyouism, or Reaganomics, but I think the only place where they agree with funky old Adam Smith is the law of supply and demand.  When you distort the political regulatory systems so that anti-humanist Armageddonist frackers can kill the price of methane by literally shattering the bedrock of the country, you make damn sure that America gets economically, politically, and socially dicked in the long run.

It’s been known for a long time that there can be terrible consequences to this kind of thing. I lived through that flood and it was not pleasant; people died. How can we even consider going ahead with fracking when a variety of serious problems are already apparent? Won’t anything stop the bastard oil companies before somebody gets killed? Or even after?

In theory it seems like you could inject liquid into a fault line causing an earthquake and thus releasing some of that pressure.  However given the complexity and size of most of the major faults I don’t really see how you’d trigger a simultaneous reaction along the whole fault, and or not cause more energy to be released than normally would have happened because you have now decreased the overall friction of the fault.

It seems good in theory, but at the same time so does not building a major city(s) near an active fault line….

That’s what bugs me most about fracking:  the frakking pollution. Then there’s the recent PR campaign about how “the coal industry is your friend”… “this message has been brought to you by your friends in the coal industry”.