No More Ohio
For the past several years, as Pennsylvanians have increasingly cried foul over the disposal of fracking wastewater in local treatment plants, gas companies have shipped the millions of gallons of water used in the fracking process to nearby Ohio. Unlike Pa, Ohio’s geology allows for deep water injection wells, which are pockets deep in the earth used to store the potentially toxic waste water. Now it turns out those deep injection wells are implicated in recent earthquakes in Ohio. Here’s how it works: sucking water out or pumping water into a porous rock formation can compress or swell the rock. If this happens near a fault, the water can make the rock slide. For a more comprehensive description of how water can impact faults, here’s what NPR’s Christopher Joyce reported last week.