Meet Michael Brudzinski, a professor of Miami University of Ohio who has been quoted as saying fracking causes earthquakes. His name came to Glenn's attention in light of the series of earthquake in Dallas, TX that are being blamed on - you guessed it - fracking. But there's a lot more to his work than the blanket statement of "fracking causes earthquakes", and he joined Glenn on Thursday's show to go into more detail.
"Michael, you are being represented as saying, and I would imagine that you’re paying attention to this and you’re seeing it more than we are. You are being quoted everywhere saying fracking causes earthquakes. How do you feel about that? Do they cause earthquakes?" Glenn asked.
Michael responded, "Our study shows, I think, a pretty definitive case where we could see that the earthquakes that took place in this part of eastern Ohio were very restricted in time, only during certain stages of the fracking operations, and so those stages are only a short amount of time, several hours, and it’s only the stages that were very close to what appears to be a pre-existing fault in the deep, old rock in that area."
"And so there were hundreds of other stages of fracking that didn’t produce earthquakes in that operation, and we think that’s important, because that means the situation where we get earthquakes from fracking is really when you get very close, within about half mile of when those faults or where those faults are, and so we think that helps us understand why this is a very rare phenomenon. The reason you haven’t really seen this a whole lot in other places is because it needs to get very close."
"If we could change the soundbite to it rarely produces earthquakes, I think I would be a little bit more comfortable with it, right? I’d like to see rare used more often. You know, we’ve got tens of thousands of fracking operations that have not produced recordable earthquakes, particularly not felt earthquakes."