Standing in his front room, Richard Kabzems brandishes a thick binder full of letters and notes of his two-year struggle to cease fracking wells close to his residence in Farmington, B.C.
Ovintiv, a multinational oil and fuel firm, introduced two years in the past that it will develop fracking for fuel at a brand new website constructed on a hill a couple of kilometre from Kabzems’s residence within the rural Lebell subdivision. The B.C. Vitality Regulator (BCER) authorized the allow.
During the last 24 months, Kabzems and his spouse, Sandy Burton, have written six detailed letters to the fuel firm opposing the challenge, and one other collection of emails and letters to the provincial regulator.
However drilling is scheduled to start on Feb. 9, on the primary of a projected 24 wells on the website.
“We are bearing the risk, and they are saying, ‘Don’t worry,’” Kabzems mentioned.
He’s, in reality, anxious. That’s as a result of in 2024, the variety of magnitude 3 or larger earthquakes linked to hydraulic fracturing and the underground storage of its wastewater reached a report excessive within the Montney Formation, a gas-rich space straddling northeastern B.C. and northwestern Alberta.
In line with monitoring information from Pure Assets Canada, there have been 34 recorded earthquakes at magnitude 3 and above (M>3.0) in Montney, greater than thrice the quantity 10 years in the past.
The correlation between oil and fuel exercise and induced earthquakes is well-documented world wide.
Magnitude 3 quakes will be felt and even trigger injury, based on seismicity consultants, relying on the place they happen. Each step up in magnitude releases 10 occasions the quantity of vitality.
Kabzems and Burton have felt quakes earlier than — from fracking farther away than the brand new drill website.
“It felt like a truck was hitting the side of our house, and the engine rumbling — this deep, low rumbling — and things would shift,” he mentioned, recalling a collection of quakes 4 years in the past.
However Kabzems and Burton’s residence insurer notified them in June 2023 that earthquake insurance coverage could be excluded from their coverage.
Allan Chapman, a former senior geoscientist with the B.C. Oil and Gasoline Fee who analyzed the info, concluded the frequency of serious earthquakes will solely enhance as fracking expands within the Peace River space.
Kabzems says the primary few occasions he skilled a quake, “you didn’t know what was happening; You didn’t have any experience. And again, with earthquakes, you just don’t know when they will occur.”
Business acknowledges danger
Hydraulic fracturing within the Montney Formation entails drilling deep vertically after which boring horizontally as a lot as 4 kilometres. A combination of water, sand and chemical compounds is then pressured into the nicely bore at excessive stress, splitting the rock to launch fuel or oil.
If the method hits a fault, it will probably trigger seismic exercise.
In B.C, the trade has acknowledged the chance. However Ovintiv’s web site states “the occurrence and risk of seismicity is generally very low,” and says it has a framework for “proactively addressing seismic activity through partnerships with independent research institutions and regulatory agencies to minimize any associated or perceived risks.”
The corporate has hosted session periods with residents in Kabzems’s subdivision, however declined an interview with CBC Information.
The incidence of stronger quakes isn’t confined to the Peace River area. In each B.C. and Alberta’s fuel and oil areas, the variety of higher-magnitude earthquakes has gone up.
“In 2021, we saw about 60 earthquakes a year, and in 2024, we were up to 160,” mentioned Gail Atkinson, a consulting seismologist and former professor at Western College in London, Ont.
Atkinson, who has studied “induced seismicity” for many years, says there’s a direct hyperlink between the rising variety of quakes and stronger seismic occasions.
“Most of the quakes that you get are smaller magnitudes,” she mentioned. However extra earthquakes means the next incidence of quakes at each magnitude, together with robust ones.
“The more fracking we do, the more oil and gas we take, the more earthquakes we will have. And the larger is the chance that one of those earthquakes will have an undesirable consequence,” she mentioned. “It’s a trade-off.”
In November 2018, building staff constructing the Web site C dam on Peace River had been pressured to evacuate the work website due to an induced quake measuring 4.6.
Atkinson urges regulators to pay extra consideration to the rising dangers and create bigger buffer zones.
“I think that for critical infrastructure, like major dams […] it makes far more sense to have exclusion zones for fracking around high-value targets,” she mentioned.
‘That’s a giant one’
The urgency to deal with the chance is exacerbated by a renewed growth in fracking in northeastern B.C. to feed a brand new, hungry pipeline simply beginning to ship pure fuel west to a LNG terminal in Kitimat, B.C. The terminal will liquify pure fuel for export, for the primary time opening abroad markets to Canadian fuel.
It’s projected the pipeline will carry two million cubic toes of fuel per day, and that manufacturing within the Montney may double within the subsequent 20 years.
U.S. President Donald Trump’s invocation to “drill, baby, drill,” suggests he’ll help extra manufacturing of oil and fuel. His nominee for secretary of vitality, Chris Wright, the CEO of Liberty Vitality, is bullish on fracking.
However indicators of an uptick in fracking-induced earthquakes are additionally obvious within the Texas oil patch.
In a single week this summer time, Scurry County, Texas was hit with greater than 60 earthquakes. CBC’s Susan Ormiston goes there to research why consultants are pointing fingers on the oil trade, and finds extra issues about quakes within the fuel fields of northeastern B.C.
Final July, 60 tremors in a single week — starting from small to important — shook the realm round Snyder, Texas.
Jay Callaway was on obligation as town’s emergency administration co-ordinator on July 26.
“It sounded like a herd of cattle coming. And then it was just an eerie feeling. And then it sounded like the cattle was leaving,” he advised CBC, standing within the native hearth division constructing.
His first thought was: “There’s a big one.” It was magnitude 5.1.
Callaway began getting calls.
“Reports of cracks in walls, driveways, foundations — [that] was the main damage,” he mentioned. An emergency crew needed to restore a crack in a metropolis water line.
The quakes additionally popped up on displays at a lab on the College of Texas in Austin, the place seismologist Alexandros Savvaidis can watch earthquake exercise in actual time.
Usually, he says, there are a pair hundred earthquakes a day — most of them small, lower than magnitude 1.5.
Whereas the oil trade itself was sluggish to confess any connection between fracking and earthquakes, Savvaidis was recruited from Europe to assist run TexNet, a state-funded program to watch seismic occasions from the Texas oil patch.
They now have 200 sensors across the state.
“When I came here in 2016, [the producers] were in denial. That was really not the best thing,” mentioned Savvaidis. “I think in the last five years, it’s been accepted by the industry and the public.”
Midland’s gamble
The trade’s hub is Midland, within the oil-rich Permian Basin. Oil exploration is so embedded within the tradition, it’s even the placement of the brand new Paramount+ drama Landman.
In Midland, drilling and fracking is so pervasive, it now occurs on the town. A tall rig towers over a parking zone and strip mall. Beneath, horizontal wells will prolong far past the pad itself, stretching a number of kilometres beneath town.
“This operator, they have a belief that they just get better wells where no one’s drilled before,” mentioned Steve Melzer, an oil trade advisor and engineer. “He’s betting that this is fertile ground that hasn’t been touched, because it was in town.”
However Melzer acknowledges the seismic exercise this previous summer time is posing a danger to trade, too.
Fracking depends on huge quantities of water, which must be saved. In line with Savvaidis, the water storage is inflicting a lot of the induced-earthquakes in Texas.
“If we have another big one, especially near an urban centre, it’s going to impact us big-time,” Melzer mentioned. “Hopefully we’ll be able to manage it, engineer more uses of that water, instead of putting it back in the ground.”
Storing the liquid is delicate, and the flawed stress, depth or amount can set off seismic exercise. It’s an issue Melzer is concentrated on fixing, each by enhancing the method and taking a look at different makes use of for the water, to cut back underground storage volumes.
“If we can’t reduce the water volumes going into the [underground] formations, we’re going to have to slow drilling down.”
Warning system
Kabzems has formally appealed the allow for the fracking pad in Farmington, B.C., however he’s had no response since October. In the meantime, building continues.
The B.C. Vitality Regulator factors to safeguards such because the 35 seismic displays within the Montney space, and a “traffic light system” that warns the regulator of seismic exercise. At ranges of magnitude 3 and above, operators should cease fracking and examine.
Gail Atkinson says the measures are helpful however not foolproof, as a result of larger earthquakes aren’t all the time preceded by smaller ones.
“If you have one that just lights up right away and gives you a magnitude 4 or 5 as its very first salvo, the traffic light will not work,” she mentioned.
“I don’t blame the oil and gas companies for following the existing regulations. They have a business. They have their own models of how they look at risk,” she mentioned.
“It’s really up to the regulators and the government to protect populations and also to protect the industry as a whole to ensure that we don’t end up with an environmental catastrophe as a result of an earthquake being generated in the wrong place.”
