@slack2thefuture.bsky.social:
Real-life supervillains have built a real-life earthquake machine.
There are no real-life super spies or superheroes to stop them. So it’s up to all of us.
New Study Nails Industry as the Cause of Record Quake, Regulators got it wrong. A driller injecting waste triggered triple temblors in the Peace River region, finds the study by Andrew Nikiforuk, April 27, 2026, The Tyee
Three major earthquakes that rattled Alberta’s Peace River country in 2022 and 2023 had nothing to do “with natural tectonic activity” as initially claimed by the Alberta Energy Regulator and everything to do with the oil and gas industry’s hidden waste problem: toxic water.
A new study led by University of Alberta geophysicists has once again confirmed, as The Tyee originally reported, that “the largest known induced earthquake in Canada” was triggered by injecting large volumes of wastewater produced from bitumen facilities deep into the ground.
The temblor knocked people off their feet and pushed the ground up three centimetres.
An injection well operated by Obsidian Energy, a Calgary-based firm, was the primary trigger of the earthquake cluster “with secondary contributions from multiple distant wells more than 20 km away,” said the study.
Since 2012 Obsidian’s 2000-metre-deep disposal well has injected more than one million cubic metres of salt water into the ground. A record-breaking earthquake occurred on Nov. 20, 2022, near the disposal well after fluids migrated into a nearby fault about 50 kilometres from the town of Peace River.
Those actions later set off two more moderate earthquakes of magnitudes 4.8 and 5.0 on March 16, 2023.
Scientists note that earthquakes of similar magnitude would have been damaging or even deadly if they had taken place in populated areas such as Vancouver or Toronto.
The oil and gas industry moves, separates and injects so much water into the ground that it has become a formidable geological force on the planet, causing earthquakes, ground deformation, well blowouts and groundwater contamination.
For every cubic metre of oil (six barrels) extracted from the ground, the oil and gas industry produces approximately three to five cubic metres of wastewater (18 to 25 barrels).
In Peace River oilsands operations typically recover a mixture of 25 to 30 per cent bitumen and 70 to 75 per cent water.
To date the oilsands industry has injected 100 million cubic metres of wastewater back into the ground in various formations around Peace River. That’s a waste stream of 40,000 Olympic-sized pools over several decades. As a result, the industry has now created three separate zones of industrial seismic activity in the region.
Managing the industry’s colossal stream of toxic water has become a regulatory and seismic nightmare around the globe as industry has begun to run out of safe disposal sites. Every day the fossil fuel industry must dispose of 250 million barrels of toxic wastewater containing salts, metals, hydrocarbons and radioactive material. That figure could soon climb to 600 million barrels a day because aging oilfields invariably produce more water.
A global phenomenon
Nearly half of that wastewater, three times saltier than sea water, is injected deep into the ground where the technology has triggered substantial earthquakes not only in Canada but in Texas, Kansas and Oklahoma. In British Columbia alone, where the LNG industry now drives extensive fracking in the Montney shale formation, the BC Energy Regulator has had to curtail or modify operations at 11 disposal wells due to rising seismic activity.
Meanwhile other forms of fluid injection have changed seismic patterns around the world. Hydraulic fracking, which blasts high pressurized streams of water, chemicals and sand into shale formations, has caused earthquakes from British Columbia to Argentina.
In Europe and Asia the injection of cold water into deep hot rock formations to create renewable enhanced geothermal power has also triggered swarms of earthquakes.
And in China high fluid injection of fresh water to dissolve salt in underground caverns over a 30-year period built up enough pressure to release a swarm of earthquakes and break another induced global record: a magnitude 6 tremor. That quake caused 13 deaths and injured more than 200 people.
Meanwhile the fracking industry in Texas has injected so much wastewater into the Permian Basin — about five billion barrels a year or what New York City consumes in eight months — that it has over-pressurized reservoirs and triggered hundreds of earthquakes.
In an attempt to dampen seismic activity in the Permian Basin, the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, permitted wastewater injection at shallower depths. But that practice has created a different headache.
As a result, salt geysers have punctured the landscape after erupting through faults or abandoned wellbores. The Wall Street Journal noted in a 2025 report that “swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction.”
Last year the Texas Railroad Commission issued warning letters restricting new disposal wells because they “had resulted in widespread increases in reservoir pressure that may not be in the public interest and may harm mineral and freshwater resources in Texas.”
The railroad commission, which is considering treating and disposing wastewater into rivers, added that “drilling hazards, hydrocarbon production losses, uncontrolled flows, ground surface deformation and seismic activity have been observed.”
No such warnings have come from the Alberta Energy Regulator, but during a recent hearing on the Peace River quakes the regulator admitted that there were so many wastewater disposal operations and so many clusters of related seismic activity in the oilsands region that “identifying which disposal operation or operations are responsible for specific seismic events is challenging.”
‘A domino-like sequence’: report
The new study on the Peace tremors, published last month by Geophysical Research Letters, concluded the earthquakes acted “as a domino-like sequence triggered by wastewater injection and sustained by interactions between fault structures.” In effect the geology channelled the wastewater into a deep ancient fault zone.
The study warned that “ongoing injection may rebuild pressure and initiate new sequences” of earthquake activity.
At the time of the quakes the Alberta Energy Regulator initially downplayed industry’s role but later changed its tune when a 2023 Stanford study identified water injection as the cause of the earthquakes.
The regulator then issued an environmental protection order against Obsidian, a mid-sized Calgary-based company. The order requested that the company act at one of its injection wells to reduce the tremors felt throughout central Alberta and submit a mitigation plan.
But the firm appealed the regulatory order on the grounds that “the evidence linking the Obsidian well to the seismic events is ambiguous” and that other industrial activities in the area such as other bitumen producers are “substantially more likely” to be the cause of the seismic events.
Fuckers, as usual
Obsidian also argued that the seismic events “were more likely induced than natural seismicity, but that this conclusion is not definitive.”
After a 2025 hearing on the matter, an Alberta Energy Regulator panel concluded that its order was warranted and that the tremors were indeed “caused by human activities.” The panel also noted that Obsidian’s wastewater disposal operations directly caused or contributed to the earthquakes along with other high-injection wells in the vicinity.
Grant Ferguson, a hydrogeologist at the University of Saskatchewan who studies deep groundwater systems, said the new study suggested that operation of injection wells is “increasing the risk of seismic activity in the Peace River region.” Ferguson also told The Tyee that it showed “the possibility of induced seismicity at depths of several kilometres are also consistent with what has been documented in other regions, notably Kansas and Oklahoma.”
He added that such studies underscore the need for more research on industry’s impact on the subsurface. “Areas with rising levels of injection associated with oil and gas recovery may have elevated seismic risk, especially as production expands to frontier areas.”
Ferguson noted implications for efforts to transition away from fossil fuels or lower the emissions associated with producing them. Citing carbon sequestration, geothermal power, hydrogen storage or lithium production from brines, Ferguson said: “All of these activities are going to involve injection of fluids, potentially at large scales.”
The volume of wastewater, fluids and gases now being injected into the ground also illustrates another predicament: the growing impact of industrial waste streams on natural underground ecosystems.
Overriding Earth’s processes
In 2024 a study published by the journal Earth’s Future and authored by Ferguson and colleagues showed that the oil and gas industry, combined with deep underground mining such as potash extraction, is now moving and injecting more water deep under our feet than what the subterranean ecosystems would do naturally. In other words, industry has become a much more powerful geological force underground than natural processes.
Moreover, all this industrial water flow is taking place in a rich microbial environment that scientists barely understand.
“Whatever the subterranean world is doing in terms of moving flows of microbes, chemicals and water, human beings are doing more of that at a depth of several hundred metres,” Ferguson told The Tyee.
Or as the study put it: “Fluid flow rates associated with oil and gas production likely exceed natural groundwater flow rates at depths greater than 500 metres.”
The study warned that renewable technologies touted as green could magnify the impact. “Projected industry scam, known not to work and often paid for by the public,carbon capture and sequestration, geothermal energy production and lithium extraction to facilitate the energy transition will require fluid production rates exceeding current oil and co-produced water extraction,” wrote the researchers.
Over the past two decades scientists have discovered more microbial communities living in the deep subsurface at depths of up to a few kilometres. Little is known about their essential work in the deep biosphere for chemical and nutrient recycling.
“We don’t know what their functions are or how they are involved in the carbon cycle,” added Ferguson.
“We are doing this to an underground system that we don’t understand. There might be some important functions we are tampering with that we can’t undo.”
Refer also to:
2011: Fracking Contamination ‘Will Get Worse’: Alberta Expert Dr. Karlis Muehlenbachs
Prof. Bob Howarth @profbobhowarth.bsky.social
Carbon capture & sequestration was always a scam, an excuse for gas to continue. Capture rates are low & require massive energy inputs, with further emissions. Sequestration? A pipe dream. This was always window dressing for big oil & gas.
A few of the comments:
Johanne:
Not the first time the AER got it wrong. Witness Jessica Ernst’s case. (read Andrew’s book Slick Water)
Another study that confirms what we already know, and yet it is still going on. Humanity is polluting the earth and will wipe itself off it’s surface. We’ve got to stop somehow.
Rocksurfer:
Earthquakes are one thing.
But what its doing to our ground water should terrify us all.
Maybe they should use that waste water to cool the Data Farms the O’Leary wants to build in Northern Alberta.
GRAHAM:
Yup, that’s what I have been saying. We are polluting precious groundwater for no good reason and by doing so have probably ruined it for the foreseeable future. Idiocy.
Paul:
In groundwater terms “the foreseeable future” is forever, for all practicle purposes. Aquifers have taken since the earth cooled to form, and once they are gone, they’re gone. The formation of underwater lakes on Antarctica, or glaciers on Greenland, look like lightspeed on the time-scale of an aquifer.
Mikey:
Thanks for another chronicle of the petro-fascist madness protected by unaccountable, captured authoritarian governments.
Let the petro-fascists consume the waste water (which is not problematic according to them) and pay for all the harms and damages out of their own pockets, not the public purse.
End petro-fascism today. Create a democratic socialism that ends unaccountable corporate-political power that is destroying our world.
Ken_Acura:
The term fracked “natural gas”, like the term “artificial intelligence”, promotes the idea that what’s happening is natural and intelligent.
Proponents of fracking, which also involves injecting produced fracking waste deep underground, are also claiming everyone needs more AI and more data centers so it makes sense to work on producing more natural gas and exporting some of it abroad.
And what’s more incredible is their rationale. Because supplies are limited and non-renewable we need to start building big and building fast to get in on the neoliberal economic largesse.
Why are we not surprised that a highly-acclaimed economist, now our (neo-Liberal) Prime Minister, is fracking happy, and is also promoting the addition of more climate changing emissions to our already-overheated crises-laden environment?
Joe:
Injection is the ultimate in “sweeping the dirt under the rug”.
How ignorant! We must be responsible for our actions and properly treat all waste. Of course it will be an added cost but better now than disasters for future generations to solve.
Fracking is another irresponsible activity.
Bearbody51:
The UCP government is working to pump all that arsenic laden tailing ponds underground as the method of taxpayer funded reclamation. Pumping 5 million bpd and growing nothing but debt and toxic waste, why are we doing this?
Paul:
The point about ‘fracking’ (formation cracking) that needs to be made clear is that it is the equivalent of ‘strip-mining’, extracting the last, possible dregs of gas and oil from a formation by smashing it, using water (which we need to survive) and chemicals injected under pressure as the ‘dynamite’ to break-up the last bits of storage area. It’s the next to last step in an oil fields production and it depends on smashing the formation without regard to the future. The last is step, of course, is abandonment, and laughing on the way to the bank, leaving behind an underground waste-land of broken stone, leaking and spreading, and guess who gets to deal with that ‘gift’.
Stillwaters:
They’re destroying the Earth, making billions from it and laughing at us all. People just aren’t getting it. One world, one life. That’s all we get. If we mess it up irretrievably, there are no do-overs. And if we’re not at irretrievable yet, we’re pretty close. Millionaires and billionaires will be insulated from the really horrible stuff cause they can afford it. The rest of us will be expendable, cause that’s the way they see us. Things are getting progressively worse and things are happening that are exacerbating the issues, all in the name of money.
zalm:
And for any clueless numbskull that thinks carbon dioxide capture and injection is still a “good thing”, here’s your wakeup call. It’s morning in Canada! CCS is a dead letter!.
GRAHAM:
I can’t believe some of us and our governments are buying into that bogus technology. I thought it had already been proven to not be effective at solving this CO2 problem we have. It’s a feel good measure by the oil companies and it’s cheap for them because they are getting the governments to kick in a ton of cash.
Not only that but we are wasting precious time chasing this fantasy instead of ideas that have much more chance of success.
Anne_Ominous:
Plus the oil companies will use CCS as an excuse to keep doing what they’re doing.
Annie_fiftyseven:
“… Meanwhile the fracking industry in Texas has injected so much wastewater into the Permian Basin — about five billion barrels a year or what New York City consumes in eight months — that it has over-pressurized reservoirs and triggered hundreds of earthquakes.
In an attempt to dampen seismic activity in the Permian Basin, the Texas Railroad Commission, which regulates the oil and gas industry, permitted wastewater injection at shallower depths. But that practice has created a different headache.
As a result, salt geysers have punctured the landscape after erupting through faults or abandoned wellbores. The Wall Street Journal noted in a 2025 report that ‘swaths of the Permian appear to be on the verge of geological malfunction.’”
First the earthquakes, then the “purges”. Should be great for residents and Alberta’s agricultural industry. So much to look forward to.
October 29, 2025 – “Toxic Wastewater From Oil Fields Keeps Pouring Out of the Ground. Oklahoma Regulators Failed to Stop It.
In January 2020, Danny Ray started a complicated job with the Oklahoma agency that regulates oil and gas. The petroleum engineer who’d spent more than 40 years in the oil fields had been hired to help address a spreading problem, one that state regulators did not fully understand.
The year prior, toxic water had poured out of the ground — thousands of gallons per day — for months near the small town of Kingfisher, spreading across acres of farmland, killing crops and trees.
Such pollution events were not new, but they were occurring with increasing frequency across the state. By the time Ray joined the Oklahoma Corporation Commission, the incidents had grown common enough to earn a nickname — purges.
… Toxic Drinking Water
As Ray pushed his agency to respond more urgently to the purges, oil field wastewater was seeping into aquifers and drinking water sources scattered across the state.
In 2021, John Roberts, who works as an oil field pump truck driver, and his wife, Misty, asked the state to test their water. They live near the 500-person town of Cement in southwestern Oklahoma, where a series of purges encircled the town for nearly four years. One gushed a few hundred feet from the high school, just beyond the softball diamond.
For residents whose private water wells pulled from the local groundwater, these purges posed severe health risks in addition to killing grass and other vegetation on their land. When the state tested water from the Roberts’ well, samples showed levels of salts well above the EPA’s recommended maximum. Their well water also contained benzene, a notorious carcinogen linked to leukemia and other blood cell cancers, at six times the EPA’s limit for drinking water.”
https://www.propublica.org/article/oklahoma-oil-gas-wastewater-pollution
September 19, 2025 – “Saltwater contamination kills cattle, threatens water in western Oklahoma: ‘It’s devastating’
A heartbreaking situation is unfolding in western Oklahoma, where ranchers near Five Mile Creek say saltwater contamination is killing cattle and threatening water sources as state officials search for the cause.
… ‘It’s devastating, not just financially, but to see the cattle suffer,’ said Mike Loula, a cattle rancher who has already lost 28 cows. ‘We’ve probably got 10 head that are showing symptoms. We really don’t know the full impact.’
On Monday, Loula and other ranchers traced the contamination to saltwater bubbling up from underground near the creek.
‘You could see it, it was pouring through a gopher hole and running into the creek,’ said Tony Setzer.”
Sean Burton:
All the spin in the world doesn’t change the physics. For every action there is a reaction.
Force anything into the ground, you create a reaction, period.
Nature doesn’t care about your opinion or your worship of money.
We are promoting extinction for profit and nature is already delivering man made disasters, storms earthquakes, poisoned air, water and contaminated food.
According to our corporate leadership, removing the existing protections will fix all our problems and make us rich enough to buy clean air, water and food from somewhere else, perhaps from the unicorns.
IMO, removing the existing protections to produce more corp profit, is just speeding up the ride to the apocalypse.