British Columbia’s only Green (and only Nobel Prize-winning) MLA is calling for a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing as a gas recovery method in the province, after a report linked it to nine out of 10 earthquakes in Alberta and northeastern B.C.
The study surveyed seismic events larger than magnitude 3.0 in the Western Canada Sedimentary Basin between 1985 and 2015, CBC News reports, and compared the data to information about more than 12,000 hydraulically fractured gas and oil wells, and 1,000 fracturing waste disposal wells.
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“More than 90% of large earthquakes were associated with nearby fracking operations,” the CBC says. “More than 60% of these quakes were linked to hydraulic fracture, with about 30 to 35% coming from disposal wells.”
Meanwhile, the New York Times reported on a different study that revealed fracking and frack waste disposal to be the main cause of a rash of earthquakes—6,000 in 2015 alone—that have made Oklahoma as seismically unstable as California.
Still, while most of the B.C. and Alberta earthquakes were linked to fracking, only a very few fracking wells—fewer than 1%—generate earthquakes, the Canadian study found.
Nonetheless, B.C. Green Party leader Andrew Weaver, an oceanographer and 2007 Nobel laureate by virtue of his role in the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is calling for a pause in the practice.
“I am calling for a moratorium on horizontal fracturing in B.C. until we establish scientific certainty on the risks it poses,” Weaver said in a release. “Earthquakes, groundwater contamination, fresh water use, sour gas leaks, environmental degradation and terrain modification, are all concerning side effects of fracking, and they warrant comprehensive scientific review. We are flying blind.”
British Columbia’s government, which has placed liquefied natural gas recovered by hydro-fracturing at the centre of its economic strategy for the province, did not respond to Weaver’s call.
