The Kansas Corporation Commission’s conservation director Thursday said lack of information inhibited declaring a precise cause of earthquakes into Reno County far away from southern Kansas sites where a surge in seismic activity was linked to injection of oil-and-gas wastewater deep underground.
Kansas’ southern tier of counties were rocked by earthquakes starting in 2013 as the oil industry increased fracking to free pockets of oil and gas from subsurface rock. Fracking wasn’t the direct cause of quakes, but the high-pressure injection of millions of barrels of wastewater from the process below the surface was blamed for the sudden seismic activity.
There were 353 earthquakes in Kansas at magnitude 2.5 or greater from 2013 to 2017. That was 10 times the number documented in the previous four decades.
(Read more: News – The Garden City Telegram)