W. Texas Subsidence Hitting 15"/Year In Spots In Permian Basin; Drilling And Injection Contribute

[hatrack]

EDIT

Wink – a tiny town 400 miles west of Dallas best known as the childhood home of the singer Roy Orbison – attracted national headlines in 2016 when the same scientists warned that the land between two expanding sinkholes a mile apart was deteriorating, risking the formation of more sinkholes or even the creation of a colossal single hole.

Injection of wastewater and carbon dioxide increases pore pressure in rocks, a likely cause of uplift. Lu told the Guardian that cracks and corrosion from ageing wells may help explain the sinking. A “subsidence bowl” near one of the Wink sinkholes has sunk at a rate of more than 15.5in a year, probably as a result of water leaks through abandoned wells causing salt layers to dissolve, the report found. Elsewhere, a lake formed after 2003 as a result of sinking ground and rising water.

Another Southern Methodist University study last year indicated that wastewater injection, often a byproduct of fracking, is a likely cause of recent earthquakes in Texas – with the Dallas-Fort Worth area, one of the most populous in the country, a hotspot.

Seismic activity in previously quiet and sparsely-populated parts of west Texas has soared in the past couple of years as the energy industry has expanded its attention beyond the Midland-Odessa area towards a mountainous and tourist-centric region near the border with Mexico. For the shifting land study, the scientists analysed medium-resolution satellite radar imagery from four counties in the west Texas oil patch taken between November 2014 and April 2017. The area they examined, 4,000 sq miles, is about half the size of Wales. Now the team is studying a far wider region, from Texas to Florida, and expects to find more evidence of ground movement.

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https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/mar/27/texas-sinkholes-oil-gas-scientists-report

[riversedge]

1. Mother Earth is crying.

[mountain grammy]

2. Spent most of 2012 in Kermit

just a few miles from Wink.. My father in law had a gas leak in his house. We could smell it, but the smell of gas in the area was so strong, we ignored it until we realized it was inside the house too. Visited the Roy Orbison museum in Wink.