Fracking: The energy revolution that shook the world

To hunting, shooting and fishing, a rugged Oklahoman named Mark Crismon has added one more hobby: seismography. Festooned on the walls of his backyard shed are antlers and bushy tails that once belonged to deer he has killed over the years. But these days his mind is on earthquakes.

Mr Crismon's wares are arranged around a laptop connected to a seismometer from a local university, which is buried 3ft under his garden. It carries a nonstop feed of wavy lines recording the amplitude of ground vibrations across the state. At least once an hour, a sudden burst of spikes signals a tremor that someone will have felt - each one representing an unexpected new threat to the US's oil and gas revolution.

The energy market has been transformed by surging production of "tight" oil and gas, which horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (or fracking) are freeing from shale and other rock formations. With US oil output close to 10m barrels a day - the all-time high it hit in 1970 - America has cut its dependence on Middle Eastern imports, created thousands of jobs and produced an oil glut that has helped to lower the global crude price.

But Mr Crismon - and scientists who have studied the issue - say it is not all good news. They blame the shale boom for triggering a spate of earthquakes that are shredding nerves and damaging homes. "It just tears everything. I got cracks everywhere," says Mr Crismon, who compares the state to a war zone. "Instead of having bombs you got earthquakes."

Quakes were rare in Oklahoma until 2009. But last year the state had a record 585 with a magnitude of 3.0 or over - more than in the previous 30 years combined, according to the Oklahoma Geological Survey. This has pushed the state past California to become the most rattled part of the continental US. No-one has been killed, but the largest recent quake, a magnitude 5.6 jolt in the tiny town of Prague in 2011, injured two people and destroyed 14 homes.

The shale boom has been helped by a drill-first-ask-questions-later approach permitted by some US states. But the quakes could mark a turning point. Bob Jackman, a petroleum geologist and former oil and gas operator, says they are a "warning flag" that carelessness will catch up with oil companies. "It's a caution to the fossil fuel industry that you must weigh other considerations."

The industry - and many of its allies in government - are pushing back, questioning the reasoning of the seismologists who say fracking-related activity is to blame for the quakes.

But with each new tremor, public support for the industry crumbles a little more. And for companies already struggling to stay profitable in an era of cheap oil, two potentially costly risks are growing: the threat of compensation claims and the prospect of a ban on the practices blamed for earthquakes. "It would bring the industry to a halt, not in a matter of months or weeks or even days, but in a matter of hours," says Kim Hatfield, president of Crawley Petroleum and the regulatory chief at the Oklahoma Independent Petroleum Association.

For other countries debating how to develop shale energy, including the UK and Germany, Oklahoma offers a salutary lesson. Despite a common misconception, the quakes are not triggered by fracking itself, which involves shattering rocks deep underground with a high-pressure cocktail of water, sand and chemicals. Instead, they result from what bursts out of the rock alongside oil and gas: vast amounts of ancient seawater. The water is worthless, so the industry injects it back underground via disposal wells. The problem is that the liquid has unlocked previously stable faults, creating the slippage that triggers a "shalequake". Such tremors have also been felt in Texas, Colorado, Arkansas, Ohio and Kansas.

"There's no longer any question that the majority of these excess earthquakes are being caused by the disposal of wastewater," says Bill Ellsworth, a research geophysicist at the US Geological Survey.

Oil accounts for a bigger portion of Oklahoma's economy than it does of Texas's. According to an industry-backed study, it supports one out of every five jobs in the state. Liquid-based fracking was even invented in the state, in the late 1940s, when engineers tried to crack rocks by pumping down napalm left over from the second world war, according to Russell Gold's book The Boom.

Oklahoma is a deep red Republican state and has been an industry bastion for decades. That has translated into significant political influence in Oklahoma's state capitol. When Johnson Bridgwater of the Sierra Club, an environmental group, lobbied lawmakers recently on an energy issue, he was told they had been visited by 20 paid advocates - and that he was the only one not speaking for the oil industry. Mary Fallin, the Republican governor, and most state lawmakers have said as little as possibleabout earthquakes. Ms Fallin did not acknowledge the scientific consensus that wastewater injection triggers seismic activity until last month.

But on voters' smartphones, apps that warn about Oklahoma's tornadoes - commonplace in the state - have long since been crowded out by the trill of notifications about tremors.

The industry's reaction has echoes of its sceptical approach to climate change. "If you're certain, then how do we explain the fact that for 60 years we did wastewater injection and did not witness this seismicity?" asks Mr Hatfield of Crawley Petroleum. Today, he says, some areas that are experiencing earthquakes have no disposal wells, and some areas with disposal wells have no earthquakes. "It's not as simple as saying, OK, they're putting water in this well and that's causing that earthquake."

T Boone Pickens, the Oklahoma-born oil legend, is more succinct. "Earthquakes my ass," he told the FT.

The stakes for the industry are high, because wastewater disposal is a critical component of the shale business model. Disposing of a single barrel of water costs at least 25 cents and as much as $1, say industry executives. An operator with 100 wells each producing 1,000 b/d of water could spend as much as $100,000 on disposals. That can make up 50-60 per cent of operating costs when wells are new, though the figure declines to about 10 per cent as water output subsides, says Mr Hatfield.

The industry's difficulty is that there are no viable alternatives: trucking wastewater to wells far from faultlines would be prohibitively expensive. Anxious local residents are demanding an immediate moratorium on wastewater injection. But Chad Warmington, executive director of the Oklahoma Oil and Gas Association, a trade group for the biggest companies, says: "We need to be able to keep doing it, because without injection wells you don't have production. And without oil and gas production in the state of Oklahoma, the economic consequences are devastating."

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Brian Bingman, president of the Oklahoma state Senate, is on the industry's side. He also works for it, at Upland Resources, when he is not a part-time lawmaker. He says it is important not to "overreact" to "pretty low-impact earthquakes". Oklahoma suffers when the industry is weak, he says, noting that a drop in oil and gas tax revenue due to the low crude price has left the state facing a $611m budget shortfall this year.

A handful of lawmakers are sounding the alarm on quakes, among them Jason Murphey, a member of the state House of Representatives. He says he is free to acknowledge the causal role of wastewater disposal because he decided not to take campaign contributions from any group that lobbies politicians. For other legislators, he says, "it's very easy to make the choice to not talk about it, because there's really not an upside".

The issue has overwhelmed the state's oil and gas regulator, the Oklahoma Corporation Commission. But it has taken incremental steps. In May 2014, it introduced a seismicity review for all proposed disposal wells and said it would not allow any within three miles of a stressed fault. In March it asked the operators of existing wells in dangerous areas to prove they were not doing anything risky. When some of them could not, it ordered that the depth of 52 wells be reduced and that about 150 slash their disposal volumes by 50 per cent.

Dana Murphy, an OCC commissioner, says she is harangued by the industry for being too aggressive - and by residents for being too timid.

Angela Spotts, co-founder of a group called Stop Fracking Payne County, is one of those who wants more forceful action. It would probably require changes to the law. "The wells need to be shut down immediately," she says.

Ohio and Arkansas have already made some areas off-limits for wastewater injection. Looking to Ms Fallin, she says: "The governor has been Awol from the beginning and she has the power to do more."

New technology could provide a way out. At a research centre in Oklahoma City, GE, the industrial group, is looking for solutions to the wastewater problem. That could mean fracking in a way that avoids releasing so much water; finding ways to let it evaporate cleanly into the atmosphere; or purifying and then discharging it into lakes or rivers. But if the techniques are no cheaper than trucking the water cross-country, they might not make a difference.

It is likely to prove impossible to make some wells both safe and economically viable. If oil production is curtailed on a large scale as a result, it will put upward pressure on crude prices.

Puffing on a cigarette, Mr Crismon, the shed seismographer, says he would not mind paying more to fuel his car. "Let's go back to Saudi Arabian oil. That would be fine with me, rather than putting up with earthquakes. I'm not worried about my gas bill. I'm worried about hundreds of thousands of dollars of damage to my house."

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