It’s highly likely recent earthquakes felt in North Texas are related to oil and gas operations, according to a United States Geological Survey geophysicist.
Last week, West Texas earthquakes sent tremors through the Dallas-Fort Worth area. The largest was recorded at a 5.1 magnitude Friday morning, according to the USGS, and five were recorded at a magnitude greater than 4.
A Scurry County judge issued a disaster declaration Friday after he said more than 60 earthquakes hit the area in seven days. Following the declaration, the geological survey reported several more earthquakes that afternoon and on Saturday.
The cluster of earthquakes were all reported in roughly the same area, about 11 miles northeast of Hermleigh. Scurry County has a population of about 16,000 and is about 250 miles west of Dallas.
More than 100 earthquakes were recorded in West Texas in the last seven days in Scurry and surrounding counties as of Tuesday, according to USGS data .
The county sits on the eastern edge of the Permian Basin, a large sedimentary basin in western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The region is a high-producing oil field, which has driven the country’s increases in total crude oil and natural gas production in recent years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
West Texas has a long history of earthquakes induced by oil and gas operations dating to at least the 1970s, according to Robert Skoumal, a research geophysicist with the USGS.
Skoumal said earthquakes in this area were first caused by “water flooding,” a process in which water is injected into fields where production has dropped in order to raise fluid pressures and allow for more oil production.
In the early 2010s, Skoumal said earthquakes were caused by a similar process where carbon dioxide was injected into fields in an attempt to increase production.
“Given the lack of natural seismicity and the long history of induced earthquakes in the area, these recent earthquakes are likely to also have been induced by oil and gas operations,” Skoumal wrote in an email to The Dallas Morning News on Monday.
Scurry County posted online Monday that more than 50 reports of damage were made following the recent quakes. Scurry County Judge Dan Hicks encourages residents to continue to report damage.