Richard Kabzems stands in his living room and spreads a thick folder with letters and notes of his two-year fight to prevent the fracking fountain near his house in Farmington, BC,
Ovintiv, a multinational oil and gas company, announced two years ago that fracking for gas at a new location from a hill from a kilometer of Kabzem’s house in the rural Lebell division. The BC Energy Regulator (BCER) approved the approval.
In the past 24 months, Kabzems and his wife Sandy Burton have written six detailed letters to the gas company that opposed the project, and another series of e -mails and letters to the provincial regulatory authority.
However, the drilling should begin on the first of February on the first 24 fountains on the website.
“We bear the risk and you say: ‘Don’t worry,'” said Kabzems.
He is indeed concerned. This is because in 2024 the number of sizes or higher earthquakes associated with hydraulic fracture and the underground storage of its wastewater in the Montney formation, a gas-rich area in which the northeast of BC and Northwestalberta were classified, reached a record high.
According to the monitoring data from Natural Resources Canada, there were 34 earthquakes in Montney in size 3 and higher (m> 3.0), more than three times the amount 10 years ago.
The correlation between oil and gas activity and induced earthquakes is well documented worldwide.
According to seismicity experts, quake of size 3 can be felt and even cause damage, depending on where they occur. Every step of the size releases 10 times the amount of energy.
Kabzems and Burton felt quake before – further away from fracking than the new drill.
“It felt like a truck hit the side of our house, and the engine rumbled – this deep, low rumbling – and things would shift,” he said, remembering a series of quakes four years ago.
But in June 2023, Kabzems and Burton’s local insurer informed that the earthquake insurance would be excluded from their policy.
Allan Chapman, a former high -ranking geoscientist at BC Oil and Gas Commission, which analyzed the data, concluded that the frequency of considerable earthquakes will only increase if the fracking in the area of Peace River expands.
Kabzems says that he experienced a quake in the first time: “They didn’t know what happened; they had no experience. And again with earthquakes they simply do not know when they will appear.”
The industry recognizes the risk
The hydraulic fracting in the Montney formation offered deep vertical and boring hole and boring horizontally up to four kilometers. A mixture of water, sand and chemicals is then pressed into the borehole hole at high pressure and divides the rock to release gas or oil.
If the process makes a mistake, it can cause seismic activities.
In BC, the industry recognized the risk. However, the Ovintiv website states that “the appearance and risk of a seismicity are generally very low” and states that they are a framework for “proactive teasing of seismic activities through partnerships with independent research institutions and supervisory authorities to minimize them or has perceived risks. ”
The company organized consulting meetings with residents in Kabzem’s subdivision, but rejected an interview with CBC News.
The incidence of stronger quakes is not limited to the Peace River region. The number of earthquakes has increased with higher performance in both BC and Albertas gas and oil areas.
“In 2021 we saw around 60 earthquakes per year and in 2024 up to 160,” said Gail Atkinson, advisory ice cream mologist and former professor at Western University in London.
Atkinson, who has studied “induced seismicity” for decades, says that there is a direct connection between the increasing number of quakes and stronger seismic events.
“Most of the quakes they get are smaller sizes,” she said. But more earthquakes mean a higher incidence of quake of any size, including strong ones.
“The more fracking we do, the more oil and gas we will have the more earthquakes. And the greater the chance that one of these earthquakes will have an unwanted consequence,” she said. “It’s a compromise.”
In November 2018, construction workers had to build the construction site C Damm am Peace River, the job had to evacuate due to an induced quake of 4.6.
Atkinson calls on the supervisory authorities to pay more attention to rising risks and create larger buffer zones.
“I think that for critical infrastructure, like large dams (…), it makes much more sense to have exclusion zones for fracking with high -quality destinations,” she said.
“This is a big one”
The urgency to fix the risk for the first time opening of markets in overseas for Canadian gas.
The project is projected that the pipeline will carry two million cubic feet gas a day, and this production in Montney could double in the next 20 years.
US President Donald Trump of “Drill, Baby, Drill” suggests that he will support more production of oil and gas. His candidate for energy secretary Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Energy, is optimistic about fracking.
In the Texas Oil Patch, however, there are also signs of an increase in the earthquakes induced by fracking.
In a week this summer, Scurry County, Texas, was hit by more than 60 earthquakes. Susan Ormiston from CBC goes there to examine why experts point out the oil industry and find more concerns about tremors in the gas fields of northeastern BC
Last July, 60 tremors shook the area around Snyder, Texas, from small to significant.
Jay Callaway was on duty on July 26th as an emergency management coordinator of the city.
“It sounded like a herd that came. And then it was just an uncanny feeling. And then it sounded as if the cattle were going,” he said to CBC, which was in the local fire brigade building.
His first thought was: “There is a big one.” It was size 5.1.
Callaway received calls.
“Reports of cracks in walls, entrances, foundations – (that) were the main damage,” he said. An emergency team had to repair a tear in a city water line.
The quake also appeared on monitors in a laboratory of the University of Texas in Austin, where seismologist Alexandros Savvaidis can observe earthquake activity in real time.
Usually, he says, there are a few hundred earthquakes per day – most of them small, less than the size 1.5.
While the oil industry itself slowly admitted a connection between fracking and earthquakes, Savvaidis from Europe was recruited to lead Texnet, a state -financed program for monitoring seismic events from the Texas oil patch.
You now have 200 sensors throughout the state.
“When I came here in 2016, (the producers) were in rejection. That was really not the best,” said Savvaidis. “I think it has been accepted by the industry and the public in the past five years.”
Midland’s gambling
The industry’s hub is Midland in the oil-rich Perm basin. Oil research is embedded in culture in such a way that it is even the place of the new Paramount+ dramas Landman.
In Midland, drilling and fracking is so widespread that it is now happening in the city. A big rig is over a parking lot and a shopping center. Among them will extend horizontal fountains far beyond the pad and extend several kilometers below the city.
“This operator, you are convinced that you only get better wells in which nobody is being drilled,” said Steve Melzer, consultant and engineer in the oil industry. “He relies on the fact that this is fertile soil that was not touched because it was in the city.”
But Melzer realizes that seismic activity last summer is a risk to industry.
Fracking is based on enormous amounts of water that need to be saved. According to Savvaidis, water storage causes most of the induced earrings quakes in Texas.
“If we have another big one, especially near an urban center, we will have an impact on us,” said Melzer. “Hopefully we can master it, develop more use of this water instead of putting it back into the ground.”
Save the liquid is sensitive and the wrong pressure, the wrong depth or the amount can trigger seismic activity. It is a problem that focuses on the solution of solution, both by improving the process and other uses for the water to reduce underground storage quantities.
“If we cannot reduce the water volumes that flow into the (underground) formations, we have to slow down.”
Warning system
Kabzems officially made an appeal against the approval for the fracking pad in Farmington, BC, but he has not answered since October. In the meantime, the construction continues.
The BC Energy Regulator refers to protective measures such as the 35 seismic monitors in the Montney region and a “ambulance system” that warns the regulator of seismic activity. In size 3 and higher, the operators must set and examine the fracking.
Gail Atkinson says that the measures are useful, but not foolproof, since larger earthquakes are not always smaller.
“If you have one that just lights up immediately and gives you a size of 4 or 5 as the very first Salvo, the traffic light does not work,” she said.
“I do not accuse the oil and gas companies to follow the existing regulations. They have a business. They have their own models on how to look at a risk,” she said.
“It is really due to the supervisory authorities and the government to protect the population and protect the industry as a whole to ensure that we do not end with an environmental disaster due to an earthquake that is generated in the wrong place.”
