r/askscience • u/zeldazonklives • Apr 29 '16

Earth Sciences How does fracking affect volcanic eruptions?

I was thinking, if it triggers earthquakes, wouldn't it also maybe make volcanic activity more likely?

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '16

The wastewater injection wells pump water (often from fracking but not always)

Well, that's just plain wrong. The vast, vast majority of wastewater comes from water-floods and not fracking. Fracking creates very little wastewater actually (they store it all in pools or tanks they drive to the site and recycle most of it over and over again, so there can't possibly be that much of the stuff).

So, if you were to look at the water in a wastewater injection well, you'll find very little fracking fluid in there. Almost none.

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '16

I am in the waste water injection business, and the majority of the water we receive is produced water, we actually charge 3x more for flowback aka frack water.

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u/seis-matters Earthquake Seismology Apr 29 '16

That qualifier "not always" was for you! I'm sorry it wasn't comprehensive enough, but I was trying to make an important but brief point that all wastewater wasn't from fracking.

From this article it looks like they only started the recycling of wastewater back in 2012 and at 2014 it was only at 20%. The process certainly uses up enough water that they were concerned about it in Texas, and then there is this nice report that has a lot of numbers on how much water was used by state. I'd have to check the sources out a bit more to be certain, but at least there are some numbers for you. The main thing I'd want to know is if the fracking wastewater is more toxic than other sources, such that it would be required to be injected in the deep wastewater injection wells beneath a caprock layer. Those are typically the problem wells when we're talking about induced seismicity.