As oil production surged here in recent years higher than in any other U.S. What sets the Permian Basin apart is the volume. Injection disposal of toxic waste is a common practice for refineries and chemical plants. This will be a desert with no inhabitants,” he said from his dining room table. “If they ruin the water out here, there won’t be anyone left. For this situation, he blames the government - specifically, the state’s oil field regulator, the Railroad Commission of Texas, which issues permits for fracking wastewater injection wells. Oil companies are doing their jobs, he said. He votes Republican, hangs a cross above his door and leans an old rifle on his living room wall. Although injection wells are intended to hold their contents forever and protect aquifers from contamination, oozing wells and bubbling lakes of gassy brine in a nearby part of West Texas show that things underground don’t always go according to plan. A magnitude 5.4 quake that hit late last year felt like a truck hit the house.ĭecades of research have linked injection wells to earthquakes, but much less is known about how the combination can affect groundwater. Then they grew, with a magnitude 3.5 quake in 2016 and a magnitude 5.0 quake in 2020. At first, Shifflett said, they sounded like shotguns in a distant field. The fracking boom kicked off here more than a decade ago, and a steady crescendo of earthquakes began a few years after. On : West Texas earthquake damages historic building on University Health campus “The oil companies are going to ruin our water.” “They’re pumping so much pressure in there,” said Shifflett, a towering, gray-haired man from a long line of farmers. One tremor left a broad hump and a half-mile crevice in his land, not far from his water wells, raising fears among him and other landowners that underground storage spaces could fracture and leak their toxic contents into aquifers and wells. The situation troubles David Shifflett, a farmer who irrigates his crops and draws his drinking water from the ground, which has started to heave and bulge in recent years.
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