Pay no attention to that shaking feeling coming from the ground underneath your feet.
That appeared to be the advice from oil executives like Harold Hamm (Can we call him fracking’s founding father?) to the growing concern that Oklahoma’s rise in earthquakes is correlated to its boom in oil and gas fracking activity.
Bloomberg recently reported that Hamm and other oil and gas executives and companies held private meetings with geologists in an attempt to slow scientific research into the issue.
Hamm is an Oklahoma native perhaps best known for being a wildly rich oil and gas tycoon, even by tycoon standards.
“[Austin] Holland had been studying possible links between a rise in seismic activity in Oklahoma and the rapid increase in oil and gas production, the state’s largest industry,” wrote Bloomberg reporters Benjamin Elgin and Matthew Philips. “Hamm requested that Holland be careful when publicly discussing the possible connection between oil and gas operations and a big jump in the number of earthquakes, which geological researchers were increasingly tying to the underground disposal of oil and gas wastewater, a byproduct of the fracking boom that Continental has helped pioneer.”
The same article reported that many in the geology field expressed concern over the influence that the oil and gas sector seems to have over science.
The state’s increased earthquake activity might not be directly related to fracking, but if it shakes like a caffeinated duck ... it might be Inhofe.
