It appears that oil and gas magnate and Oklahoma native Harold Hamm didn’t get rich due to his rigorous adherence to scientific fact.
“You know, these earthquakes primarily have been happening in areas where there is no oil and gas activity, first of all,” begins Hamm’s rebuttal of recent studies that correlate the uptick in Oklahoma quakes to hydraulic fracturing practices. “And second of all, there’s not any tie to stimulation, fracking of wells in Oklahoma. There’s been no tie to that at all,” he told NBC News.
Hamm goes on to say that our state also experienced a lot of seismic activity in the ’50s, perhaps implying that it is a natural phenomenon, but he also conceded there might be a connection between injection wells and recent temblor “disturbance.”
“But for the most part, that hasn’t been the case,” he said.
“[In the ’50s,] there were 30 earthquakes reported over just more than a decade at a time …” said Glenn Brown, vice president of geology at Continental Resources Inc., in a NewsOK.com report from June 2014.
We’ll take this opportunity to remind readers that Continental Resources is “America’s Oil Champion,” according to its own website.
So, there were 30 recorded earthquakes in the ’50s. For comparison, Oklahoma had more than 30 earthquakes in the week leading up to Hamm’s comments.
“The increase in seismicity has been found to coincide with the injection of wastewater in deep disposal wells in several locations, including Colorado, Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma and Ohio,” reads the U.S. Geological Survey’s (USGS) website.
Hamm knows oil and gas, obviously, so maybe he knows better than the USGS, despite the fact that Oklahoma had more than 1,700 quakes in the past year.
Let’s just sit back and drink each other’s milkshakes and smile.
This article appears in May 6-12, 2015.