The BC peace region experiences about 1,500 small earthquakes a year and most of them are associated with fracking operations, according to a new study.
Investigators set up 15 earthquake detectors across the region and recorded 5,757 small earthquakes that would not have been detected between 2017 and 2019.
“The vast majority of them appear to be associated with hydraulic fracking operations,” Alessandro Verdecchia, one of the study’s lead researchers, said in an interview on CBC’s Daybreak North. The study was published in the journal Seismological Research Letters in July.
According to the McGill University geophysicist, the connection was made by determining the exact time and location of seismic events and comparing those data with information from fracking companies about their operations.
“If we see a kind of connection in time and place between the action and the occurrence of the earthquake, we can associate an occurrence of the earthquake with the fracking operation.”
Detection of large shocks of magnitude
Verdecchia says researchers are trying to determine the largest magnitude earthquake that could be caused by fracking in the western Canada sedimentary basin, a region in northeastern British Columbia that includes the Montney Formation, a shale gas area with nearly 3,000 production sources are.
“Large events can produce greater acceleration and velocity of the ground, and can obviously produce greater damage to infrastructure,” he said.
In 2018, a magnitude 4.5 earthquake shook Fort John. No damage was reported, but people could feel it as far as Dawson Creek and Chetwynd.
Verdecchia says the largest size discovered in the western Canada sediment basin associated with fracking was a 4.6 incident in August 2015. In China, however, a magnitude 5.5 seismic event has been associated with a hydraulic fracking operation.
The other thing that researchers want to understand is how far from fracking these events can occur.
“This will be useful for operators if they decide to start a fracking well, to start operations because they can more or less keep a distance, let’s say of major infrastructures or populated areas,” Verdecchia explained.
According to research so far, seismic events have been detected at a distance of up to five kilometers from the fracking operations.
