Earthquakes Today Increased By Storing CO2 Underground? Practice Could Be Triggering More Quakes, Says Expert

Storing massive amounts of carbon dioxide (CO2) may offer a promising way to curb the effects of global warming, but a scientist said this practice in power plants and refineries could cause some serious effects underground.

Geophysicist Mark Zoback explained that the extra pressure used to inject CO2 deep underground may cause faults to slip or create fractures, which can release the huge amount of carbon dioxide already buried underneath.

The pumping of the CO2 from fossil fuel-fired power plants, Zoback noted, may also trigger many more earthquakes than are already being produced by oil and gas-related waste water disposal.

While those earthquakes are unlikely to be big enough to hurt people or property, the Standford scientist warned they could still cause serious problems for the reservoirs containing the gas.

"It is not the shaking an earthquake causes at the surface that creates the hazard in this instance, it is what it does at depth. It may not take a very big earthquake to damage the seal of an underground reservoir that has been pumped full of carbon dioxide," Zoback explained.

Scientists have long feared that the carbon dioxide that comes from the combustion of coal, gas, and oil is accelerating the Earth toward a climate calamity that makes land and seas warmer as well as force weather zones to shift.

One of the strategies that promises to stop this phenomenon from happening is to keep these CO2 from entering the atmosphere by storing it underground, where everybody hopes it will remain for millennia.

But Zoback said this has a side-effect: CO2 underground storage is an easy way to trigger earthquakes in regions that have built-up stresses and strains over the ages in the Earth's crust.

"We have faults that are accumulating stress over thousands to hundreds of thousands of years, even in Iowa. So when you inject water or gas or any fluid, it can set some of them off," he added, according to Science News.

From 1970 to 2000, geologists had recorded an average of only 20 quakes with magnitudes of at least 3.0, which can cause lamps to sway in the central and eastern part of the U.S.

But the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) said the figure rose between 2010 and 2013, disclosing that there had been 450 more tremblors of the same magnitude that jolted the region a rate about five times higher than normal.

"There have been hundreds of earthquakes in Oklahoma alone. That state is making magnitude 3s faster than we are in California. It is unprecedented," USGS earthquake mechanics expert William Ellsworth said, according to Science News.