Latest / PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast / Induced Earthquakes, Fracking, and the Future of the Subsurface with Dr. Katie Smye

Transcript

Induced Earthquakes, Fracking, and the Future of the Subsurface with Dr. Katie Smye · PlanetGeo: The Geology Podcast

• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to Planet Geo, the podcast where we talk about our amazing planet, how it works, and why it matters to you.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, man, I'm always ready.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: What are you talking about?
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, you're always Chris, always ready, boys.
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's right.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: Um it's what I say about myself.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's not always true, especially in the evenings after you've had a bag of Doritos to yourself and you're passed out with the city.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: That's lights out at that point.
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_02: You know what I was looking at?
• 0:35
  SPEAKER_00: I was looking back at my photos that you had texted me for what was I looking for?
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: I you had sent me some photos this summer, and I was looking back for them, and I saw one that I think Jenny took of you asleep on your your uh your little recliner couch with Doritos in your mouth.
• 0:50
  SPEAKER_00: No way.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: She took a picture of me?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think so.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_00: It was from a while.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think it was staged.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: It wasn't staged?
• 0:57
  SPEAKER_00: She's no, I don't think so.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_02: She sent me from my phone to you.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, of you with some Doritos.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's from like Oh, they are the best chip ever made, guys.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_02: Ever ever that's it's my public service announcement right there.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_00: Doritos people, send Chris a box of Doritos already.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 1:18
  SPEAKER_00: Man, this uh this interview was this was m one of the ones I've learned the most about, I think.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: Like what?
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_00: What did you learn?
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Tell me that.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: I learned a lot about how you know fracking works, how the subsurface works, how the oil industry operates, kind of you know, broadly as well.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Things things I just never really knew or really understood at a at a basic level.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I had some you know a vague idea of, but didn't really actually know the numbers behind.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_00: What what do you think?
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, I learned uh some things too today that that just I think really mind-blowing.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_02: Uh, one is that, well, first of all, the debate is settled on induced seismicity.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_02: She didn't say that in a that was very straightforward.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_02: You know, no, this is done.
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_00: It's no matter of fact.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: Uh let me just interrupt, Chris.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: We interviewed Dr.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Smai.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: Um, Dr.
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Smai, she got her Bachelor of Science from Oklahoma, University of Oklahoma, PhD from Cambridge in the United Kingdom.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: She's a research associate at the Bureau of Economic Geology at the University of Texas at Austin now, and really works uh at this really interesting intersection.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_00: She's a fundamentally an academic researcher, uh she's a research professor, but liaises a lot with industry and works for one of these kind of industry co-funded um entities out of the UT Austin.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So that's what we're talking about.
• 2:38
  SPEAKER_00: And and Katie has a deep expertise, many publications, dozens of publications on her CV, and focuses, at least now, a lot on its induced seismicity, which is um faulty.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_02: Fracking induced, yes.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_02: Or not not necessarily fracking, but the injection of water back down into the ground.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: That's right, that's exactly right.
• 2:59
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: So sorry, Chris.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_00: That that's we're talking to this was an amazing conversation, really insightful.
• 3:04
  SPEAKER_00: Katie has I the one of the best answers I've ever heard to why you should get into geoscience.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, this is like just an inspiring, inspiring answer.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of got tingles, you know, still from this.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's just like uh great answer, super invigorating to me personally and professionally.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: So um but anyway, induced seismicity, Chris.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_02: I yeah, I was I was shocked.
• 3:27
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, I was shocked by some of the magnitudes of this induced seismicity, bigger earthquakes than than I ever thought.
• 3:36
  SPEAKER_02: Um, so that was something I learned, and also I learned about the with conventional wells and how they kind of use pressure to push around the oil to different places, you know, like that's a that's amazing.
• 3:48
  SPEAKER_02: Um I did I didn't know that coming into today.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: So you know, the the technology at use in even just to imagine drilling horizontally through yeah, and keeping it horizontally in a 30-foot thick layer uh of of sediment miles deep down in the earth is just astonishing technology at many levels.
• 4:10
  SPEAKER_02: Um yeah, and I think I mean fracking itself is not is is not new.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_02: We've been doing it for a long time, but these were vertical wells, and it's very expensive to put a well in, and and you can't get very far into the shale when you do do it this way.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_02: But the ability to like get down to that shale, kick off, and then go horizontal in and you can do this in all different directions, a 360 from one pad it makes for a very less uh less of a footprint on the surface for sure.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's super interesting.
• 4:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I I I really appreciated Katie's take on you know the induced seismicity, fracking, energy industry broadly uh in the United States and elsewhere, and and just bringing, I think, some nuance, um, some really well much needed nuance to this these conversations.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: Um, plus just an inspiring geoscientist.
• 4:58
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, just a great, great person to have fun talking to rocks with.
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_00: It's amazing.
• 5:03
  SPEAKER_00: Right on.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_00: Well, hey, let's get to it, Jesse.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go.
• 5:06
  SPEAKER_00: Katie Smai coming at you.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_00: All right.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_00: Katie, Dr.
• 5:13
  SPEAKER_00: Smai, thank you for joining us on Planet Geo and welcome.
• 5:17
  SPEAKER_03: Thank you so much for having me.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_03: Good to see you, Jesse and Chris.
• 5:19
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, good to see you too.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_00: Full disclosure, uh, we socialize, our families, our friends, and so we hang out frequently.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_00: Although there's a lot of questions in here that I've never had the pleasure of asking you, and so very curious to get the answer to because rarely we have four children combined between us, so like rarely time for an actual conversation.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_00: Even if there's a bunch of geologists in the room, we don't talk rocks that much, actually.
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_00: Um, so you know, other people don't allow us to.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_02: You've actually had a lot of questions about how you four get together because there's a lot of doctors in the room, and I'm really curious as to how that works.
• 5:53
  SPEAKER_02: You know, yeah, it's very amusing to me how this the dynamics of how this could play out.
• 5:59
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 6:00
  SPEAKER_02: Very entertaining.
• 6:01
  SPEAKER_03: Well, according to my kids, three of us are not real doctors, so that that narrows it down.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, that's what I was wondering.
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_02: If if Tess goes around with air quotes and she says Dr.
• 6:11
  SPEAKER_02: Smy, and you know, does this is that how it goes?
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_00: I I think yeah, all of Katie's kids and and all of my wives um think that there's a not many doctors in the house.
• 6:22
  SPEAKER_00: There's not you know, not many real doctors there.
• 6:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: Um okay, well, on to real stuff, on to geology.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_00: Chris, okay, what do you say?
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_02: You ready?
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_02: Let's do it.
• 6:32
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Katie, it's thanks again for coming on here.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_02: It's great to have you.
• 6:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um, we always start off asking this question because Jesse and I both have personal stories.
• 6:41
  SPEAKER_02: So, what's your story?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_02: How did you get into geoscience?
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_02: Was there a moment?
• 6:45
  SPEAKER_02: Was it a process?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_02: What's that look like?
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, great question.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_03: Um, no aha moment for me.
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_03: My geoscience life is just feels like an outworking of all the things I love kind of coming together and progressing.
• 7:01
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I loved hiking, I loved being outside, I loved looking at rocks and being in nature, and I loved traveling.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_03: And my parents really supported this.
• 7:11
  SPEAKER_03: So my mom just like gave me kind of free license to pick our family vacations.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_03: And I always wanted to go see volcanoes, you know.
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_03: I could say volcanologist at a young age, and that was like an impressive skill.
• 7:22
  SPEAKER_03: So that's what I wanted to be.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, we would go to Costa Rica or Alaska or Hawaii, and everybody got dragged around to see volcanoes, um, which was great fun.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_03: So they were supportive.
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_03: My dad, um, he did a master's later in life in geology.
• 7:37
  SPEAKER_03: He was a high school teacher, and he taught um an evening night class for a community college in G geology.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_03: And then he taught a high school class as well.
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, they would have field trips for their uh community college class.
• 7:51
  SPEAKER_03: So I was always dragged along on these field trips, you know, willingly, but looking at road cuts and, you know, being with geologists are the worst drivers, right?
• 7:59
  SPEAKER_03: Always stopping at road cuts.
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it came naturally to me with a lot of support for you know from my parents.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I went to undergrad to study geology.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: I got a chemistry degree as well, but at that time I was adamant.
• 8:14
  SPEAKER_03: I went to the University of Oklahoma, and you know, this is a big oil and gas school with a lot of like geophysics background, and I had some awards while I was there, and so I was heavily recruited by oil companies.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_03: And at the time I was like, I'm absolutely not going into oil and gas.
• 8:30
  SPEAKER_03: This is, you know, this is the worst.
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: I'm gonna go do a PhD and went to the UK.
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_03: And then, as it turns out, fate is funny like this.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: I ended up working in oil and gas, but for an academic salary, not an oil and gas salary.
• 8:43
  SPEAKER_03: So don't take any advice from me.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_00: That's funny.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: You took the pauper's route into uh into into the oil and gas field.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_03: I did.
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_02: So you didn't mess around, did you?
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_02: You went right into geoscience right from the get-go.
• 8:58
  SPEAKER_03: I did, I did, yeah.
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, went right into it, knew what I wanted to do.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:02
  SPEAKER_00: Two two questions on that, Katie.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's really interesting.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_00: When when were you allowed to start planning your family field trips?
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: How old were you when you got to start planning that?
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_00: And then how old were you when you kind of knew you were gonna get a geology degree?
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like that was your you know, path in college.
• 9:17
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, definitely pre-teens.
• 9:19
  SPEAKER_03: I was I was in charge of these uh these vacation planning.
• 9:23
  SPEAKER_01: So cool.
• 9:24
  unknown: Yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:26
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 9:27
  SPEAKER_03: Thankful for supportive parents.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_03: But um, but even in undergrad, I I kind of was in and out of, I mean, I knew I wanted to do geoscience, but I also loved chemistry and had a skill uh skill set in chemistry.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: So I did um end up doing a a double major actually.
• 9:43
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, ended up wanting to kind of keep those quantitative chemistry skills, but also you know, enjoyed being out in nature and looking at rocks.
• 9:52
  SPEAKER_00: Wow, okay, that's so cool.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: That that's the first time we've heard somebody who had um that much, I would say, I don't know, family support of geologists, I suppose, Chris.
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: Is that right?
• 10:02
  SPEAKER_00: We I mean Rachel Phillips had two geologist parents, but but I don't think there was it was like this open-ended pick what you want, and then you know, everybody get into it kind of attitude.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_02: So that's yeah, so Katie, did you go to the high school that your dad go ahead?
• 10:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, no, no, no.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: I was just gonna say they're all nice places, right?
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_03: So it's not a big ask to like go to Costa Rica.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_03: So my mom said I want to look at rocks in like central Nebraska, my mom might have said that's a hard path.
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, that's right.
• 10:29
  SPEAKER_00: No, we're not going to the remote Northwest Territories to swap bugs.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 10:34
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, did you go to the high school where your dad taught?
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: I did, yeah.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_03: And my mom taught there as well.
• 10:40
  SPEAKER_03: She taught in accounting.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: So I had both of my parents for teachers in high school.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_03: I think my dad was my calculus teacher as well.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_03: So math was his real strong point, but geology was kind of this additional theme.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_02: So did you take the geology class?
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, I did, yeah.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: Star student.
• 10:54
  SPEAKER_03: You did.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Star student, of course.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, of course.
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's the all three of us had our fathers in class then.
• 11:01
  SPEAKER_00: Um as teachers.
• 11:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's uh that's kind of amazing.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's pretty cool.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_02: Yours wins though, Katie, because ours were both biology, and and that's not really as cool.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: Or it's fun.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_00: Um, okay, so this leads us maybe into your job now.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: Could you what is your job title right now, Katie?
• 11:20
  SPEAKER_03: I am a research associate professor.
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_03: So I am a professor, but I only do research.
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_03: I don't do any teaching.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: Um, I have students, like master's and PhD students, but I work in an organization, uh a part of the University of Texas that is primarily focused on research.
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm also the principal investigator for the Center for Injection and Seismicity Research.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we just call it scissor, it's a big mouthful, studying earthquakes and specifically earthquakes caused by injection and other challenges associated with large-scale kind of injection projects in the subsurface.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_00: So, okay, my understanding of this, and correct me if I'm wrong here, where correct me where I'm wrong, actually, is that you you know you kind of have this private, public-private kind of funding partnership that there's a lot of industry interaction that you experience.
• 12:09
  SPEAKER_00: Is that would that be fair to say?
• 12:11
  SPEAKER_01: That's right.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_00: So how does that how does that work?
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: I because I don't think I mean I think people know what a research professor does, like at a university, but when you're sort of crossing into that industry or collaborating so intimately or getting funded by industry, how does that work?
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: And how are you connected or maybe kept at arms arm's length from kind of industry goals or univers?
• 12:35
  SPEAKER_00: How do you how do you like uh fit in between the university and the in the industry?
• 12:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, how does that balance?
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: You're right into it.
• 12:41
  SPEAKER_03: That's the that's the whole heart of uh the challenge of what we do.
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, so my my program, uh the program I lead is is technically called an industrial associates program.
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so it's really a collaborative research group.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Our funding is all from industry sponsors, oil companies are part of those.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: And we um essentially gather up the you know their memberships for the year.
• 13:06
  SPEAKER_03: We have a research budget to work with.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: We don't have any deliverables, we don't agree to any kind of products that we put out specifically, but we have a budget we work with and we develop a set of research goals that we'd like to achieve for the year.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: We generally kind of do those in alignment with our sponsors.
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we want to be doing work that people find important and interesting.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: We have to also do work that we can publish.
• 13:31
  SPEAKER_03: So we're we're independent, we're completely independent in our research, but we all kind of have a shared goal in our research collaborative.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_03: So all of the companies that sponsor our work just have have a similar set of outcomes they'd like to see happen from our work.
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_00: So I uh the only like analogy that I know of that exists is is from like mineral exploration in geosenses, where like a you know, some whatever these companies are, they'll put in 50 grand or however much it is to the pot every year.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_00: What they kind of get out of it is usually technique development.
• 14:04
  SPEAKER_00: They get early access to some new exploration geochemical toolkit or something like that, you know, computational.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: What's the what's the point for the industry people?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_00: Like is it is it just is it kind of like part interacting with really high-level geochemists or you know, um geologists like yourself?
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Is that the point for them?
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting because you one would think that this would be a hard sell.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_03: So many of these research programs, and the organization I work for, the Bureau of Economic Geology, has many different organizations.
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_03: Most of them are kind of on the money-making side.
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_03: So, how much oil and gas can you get out of the ground?
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_03: How much carbon can you sequester?
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_03: You know, where can we drill geothermal wells?
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_03: Where can we build data centers in Texas?
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_03: Like, where do we have the energy supply, right?
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_03: And and a close colleague of mine calls those puppies and rainbows things.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_03: And we're in the business of barbed wire and rattlesnakes.
• 14:58
  SPEAKER_03: We're not in the business of puppies.
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_03: So one would think this would be a hard sell.
• 15:02
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's not a hard sell in in uh the Jackson School of Geosciences at UT, our group is by far the largest industrial associates program, the best funded.
• 15:12
  SPEAKER_03: We have the closest collaboration.
• 15:14
  SPEAKER_03: We right now have 28 member companies.
• 15:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so I will get to answering your question, but I want to, you know, tell you there's a great diversity in the types of groups that sponsor our work.
• 15:24
  SPEAKER_03: So we have um international super majors like Exxon and Chevron.
• 15:29
  SPEAKER_03: We have kind of smaller independent oil companies that are working purely in the Permian Basin in West Texas.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: We have land management companies that are just seeking to kind of maximize the value of land and mineral rights for their stakeholders.
• 15:45
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we have what we call midstream companies.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_03: So these are companies that are not producing oil and gas or using oil and gas, but they're in in the midstream.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_03: And in this case, they're managing water produced with oil.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so they're just disposing of water.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_03: And then we have actually the regulatory agencies of oil and gas in Texas and New Mexico are both funders of our research program as well.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_03: So this is a really unique like everybody.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_03: So it's this very broad stakeholder group, right?
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_03: And they're not always in alignment on everything because there's a wide range of operational practices that each of these companies are happy to kind of in.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_03: There's some tension on occasion between regulations and companies, and we're kind of there in the middle of it all.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_03: So I guess people's people's reason for sponsoring it varies.
• 16:35
  SPEAKER_03: Some smaller companies, for example, would like actual work products.
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_03: They would like a geological model that would take them three man years to build, and we have the the ability to do that.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_03: Some like the good press and and uh exposure that comes with being in the room with all of these people and just access to the research results and to the general discussions.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_03: So they're the motivations are different, differ kind of from one to one.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it must be so good for students that are being you know trained in your group or in other groups that they just get to liaise so closely with all these different parts of the of the uh of the industry.
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: That's very cool.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_03: And our program's been running for 10 years now, and there are still some of the earliest kind of foundational members are still members and still funding our work every single year.
• 17:23
  SPEAKER_03: We don't lose companies knock on wood to being unhappy with our work.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we lose them to divestments from assets in a certain region or to mergers and acquisitions.
• 17:34
  SPEAKER_03: But um, in general, we've just just maintain this really healthy collaboration, I think.
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_03: That was very cool.
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 17:41
  unknown: Yeah.
• 17:42
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, you touched on it at the end there when you said that you don't lose people, but what happens when your research findings don't really align with industry?
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_02: What's that feel like?
• 17:52
  SPEAKER_02: What what happens then?
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's interesting.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, there this is a lot like like polishing a rough gym, right?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_03: And this is why we hold quarterly meetings with our sponsors.
• 18:04
  SPEAKER_03: So we kind of, as we do our work, we are rolling it out to them.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_03: You know, they don't they don't open like nature geoscience and hear something for the first time.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: And that's part of their motivation for being in the room, is that if we are going to say, for example, you know, so let me just clarify, Katie, nature geoscience is a publication.
• 18:22
  SPEAKER_00: So they don't just see a publication come out first and then they're like, oh, where'd this come from?
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: You're kind of communicating to them along the way.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_03: And there's no, you know, nobody has a say in what we publish.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_03: We maintain, you know, scientific integrity and independence.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_03: But what we do do is, you know, all of these company, not all, many of these companies have a lot better data than we have.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_03: Some of it we don't see.
• 18:45
  SPEAKER_03: Many of them have research arms and in their organizations that far surpass what we can do.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_03: And so part of what we like to do is just socialize our data and socialize our findings before we jump to publication just to make sure that we're doing the best job we can.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: And nobody wants us to publish a model that's wrong.
• 19:05
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody wants us to say someone caused an earthquake if they didn't.
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_03: That's in nobody's interest.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_03: And so, so, Chris, to answer your question, you know, we socialize this along the way.
• 19:14
  SPEAKER_03: We knock off the rough edges, and sometimes there is, you know, a process by which we have to say, okay, you know, if we're wrong, show us the data and we'll consider the data.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_03: But we need to see, we need to see what you see to be able to come to the same conclusions.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a it's a mutually beneficial process, I think.
• 19:33
  SPEAKER_00: That brings up a really interesting question that I was hoping to get to is my understanding or at least my perception of oil and gas data is that tons of it is proprietary.
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: That like there's all this stuff out there about data about the subsurface that nobody has access to unless you're in the company.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_00: Is that accurate?
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: Or are you competing on like a competing?
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: That's the wrong word, but are you kind of operating on a level playing field with you mentioned these company research company researchers or company research groups?
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: Like compare and contrast those to for I mean, maybe for the students out there who are listening, maybe that are like there's these two different entities, they're all doing research, like which ones more interesting or better, or if that are like I don't know, uh how are they different?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: How are they similar?
• 20:16
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, that's a really good question.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Holy crazy.
• 20:19
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, Chris, will you summarize for me, Chris, what I'm asking?
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_02: I got lost.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: Oh my gosh.
• 20:25
  SPEAKER_02: What's your question?
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_00: My question is uh, do they have do company research things have a lot more data than like you have in you know in your group?
• 20:33
  SPEAKER_03: Some do.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_00: Access to more data.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_03: Some do, some do, and some uh operate um pretty blindly.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: So it really company strategy.
• 20:43
  SPEAKER_03: Some of the big companies I mentioned, yes, they have a lot of beautiful data.
• 20:46
  SPEAKER_03: Um, we have different ways of working with companies depending on what they do.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_03: So we kind of enter into data disclosure agreements with companies that protect their data when we look at it.
• 20:58
  SPEAKER_03: And and you know, in many cases, they'll say, we can't actually send you anything, but if you can fly to our office in Houston and sit with us and look when we show you 3D seismic data and get out a marker and trace on a piece of paper, then you know, we're we'll be able to help you.
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_03: So there are ways that we manage to work this.
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, it's uh it's good fun.
• 21:20
  SPEAKER_03: That's um, but but then cloak and dagger, that's great.
• 21:26
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, part of because we're academics, like things, things come to light.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_03: So in every case, you know, it's just baby steps.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_03: It's okay, we'll have this agreement, we'll look at your data, we'll come back to you with our findings.
• 21:37
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, we'll need to present this in a sponsor meeting.
• 21:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, we'll need to present this in a general conference for our field.
• 21:46
  SPEAKER_03: And okay, we're ready to publish this.
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_03: Can you get us approval for this one figure that shows your data?
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_03: So it's a step process, but I think it works quite well.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, it's interesting.
• 21:56
  SPEAKER_03: There's a new, our group has a new agreement as of last year.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_03: Which is kind of this very interesting project where the regulator in Texas has actually funded acquisition, not acquisition, licensing of previously acquired data just for the purposes of leveling the playing field.
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_03: And we're the intermediary in that, where we get this, you know, many millions of dollars of worth of data and we get to look at it and interpret it and publish on it as the intermediary and kind of level the playing field for regulators and operators.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_03: So that's been a novel progress.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_02: Can we just for the listeners, Katie, can we talk about maybe what some of those data points are?
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_02: What do those data sets look like?
• 22:39
  SPEAKER_02: Is like because well logs are public, right?
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_02: That's they that's not proprietary.
• 22:45
  SPEAKER_02: So what is like what are we talking about?
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_03: Well, some um some well logs are public and some are proprietary and some are supposed to be released but aren't.
• 22:58
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a you know, every state differs.
• 23:00
  SPEAKER_03: So some states, like North Dakota, for example, is very good about making data be released publicly and you know, having having core data accessible and online.
• 23:10
  SPEAKER_00: So can can we can we just back up and say what is well, what is a well log?
• 23:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, like what kind of data, what what is the data point that we're talking about here?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_03: So the types of data there are, yeah.
• 23:18
  SPEAKER_03: Mainly we are working with in oil and gas producing basins, we're working with data in the subsurface.
• 23:24
  SPEAKER_03: So these are not things, not rocks that most of the time we don't have any outcrops.
• 23:28
  SPEAKER_03: We can rarely ever see these rocks.
• 23:31
  SPEAKER_03: We know about them from wells that have been drilled in these basins, some cases miles deep.
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_03: And there are ways, different ways of of acquiring data.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_03: One is to actually take a core of the rock volume.
• 23:43
  SPEAKER_03: And actually, the the agency I work in, the Bureau of Economic Geology, has two core repositories and probably it's thought to be the largest collection or the largest archive of subsurface rock data in the world.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_03: So we have beautiful core data to work with.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_03: And then companies will take logs of their wells.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_03: So they'll measure like the gamma ray, the radio radiation in the well, they'll measure the resistivity of the fluids, they'll measure um porosity with a neutron kind of scattering.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_03: So there are many different methods that we use, and then we can interpret those.
• 24:17
  SPEAKER_03: And then there are other types of data.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_03: There's like active seismic data, you know, where we're the actually imaging the subsurface of the earth.
• 24:25
  SPEAKER_03: That's important in our work.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_03: There is seismic data like earthquakes.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_03: This has been huge in understanding induced earthquakes.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_03: Many of the faults that earthquakes are occurring on, we can't see them in 3D seismic, and they're not actually captured in logs or cores.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_03: And we don't see them at all until they're lit up with earthquakes.
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_03: So earthquakes occur, they're monitored, and then we map faults from earthquakes.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_00: Um, interesting.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_03: We have data too on on like ground surface deformation.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_03: So we are now using satellite data like the INSAR from the Sentinel satellites that pass over the area in Texas we work in every 12 days or so.
• 25:05
  SPEAKER_03: And those every 12 days can take a measurement of the elevation of the ground surface and calculate, or really the the distance, the line of sight distance from the satellite to the ground.
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_03: And we can measure how the ground surface is changing from oil and gas operations in the basin.
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_03: And it is changing in elevation, which is pretty shocking.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_02: Um to what degree is that is that accurate?
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_02: First of all, it's amazing.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_02: This is geodesy, right?
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, this the accuracy is greater if the signal is greater, right?
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_03: So in the areas where we're working where there's a strong ground surface deformation change signal, you end up having an accuracy of something like a plus or minus one centimeter.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_03: So we would filter out anything within a centimeter.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_03: But we work with experts in in UT aerospace engineering who are funded by NASA to process this data.
• 25:57
  SPEAKER_03: That is way outside my area of expertise.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, they have to remove tropospheric noise and account for vegetation and all sorts of things.
• 26:06
  SPEAKER_03: But it's extremely useful because you know you might be surprised that producing fluids from reservoirs at, you know, several miles underground, in some cases five, you know, whatever, three miles underground, um, causes the ground surface to subside like 10 or 12 centimeters over the course of a few years.
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: And then 10 or 12 centimeters.
• 26:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_03: And then on the other end, injecting fluids like wastewater, which is what we study, causes uplift.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_03: So you have these competing signals in the subsurface.
• 26:40
  SPEAKER_00: At what scale does that have is it like broadly, I mean, smoothly distributed distributed?
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_00: So is it kind of a a low-level uh uplift or depression that forms kind of all over, or is it more heterogeneous than that?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great question.
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_03: And answering that is how we learn about the geomechanics of the subsurface, right?
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, interesting.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_03: If you have, and firstly, it depends as well on as on distance from the surface.
• 27:09
  SPEAKER_03: So this is what models try to solve, right?
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_03: The closer you are to the ground surface, the sharper your signals are.
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so, just as an example, there was a case in a county of a well blowout on the ground surface, tens of feet into the air of wastewater kind of spewing at the ground surface.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_03: And that was caused by injection that then traveled in the subsurface, the pressure kind of plume traveled several miles, 10 miles probably.
• 27:38
  SPEAKER_03: And the signal from that, and the the reason that that was able to be kind of tracked to be with these injection wells is because that plume could be tracked through INSAR data.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_03: And because it was so close to the surface where where this fluid migration was happening, the signal was pretty sharp.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, we'll see like a peak of an increase of tens of centimeters in ground surface elevation.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, that's amazing.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_03: Jesse, I feel like we need to back up a little bit.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 28:07
  SPEAKER_00: I yeah, I was just thinking this too.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_02: We have a tendency to just jump right into the weeds.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_02: But I think that Katie, if can you give us a description of the fracking process, you know, and maybe a little bit about like you know, the early days of the horizontal drilling versus where we are now?
• 28:26
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's been a good 15 years since we've really you know made advancements.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_02: So can we back up and then we can dive into the specifics of the induced seismicity and all that?
• 28:36
  SPEAKER_03: All right, okay, let's do it.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_03: Let's back up.
• 28:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um, so fracking, you know, is is kind of an umbrella term for a group of technologies that were developed, as you say, like 15 years ago, uh in some cases, you know, started to be implemented.
• 28:54
  SPEAKER_03: But what it really, when people say fracking, they mean horizontal drilling.
• 28:58
  SPEAKER_03: So the technology that allows us to drill not just a vertical well, but to drill horizontally in the subsurface and then hydraulically fracturing the formation.
• 29:07
  SPEAKER_03: But to back even further up, you know, when traditional oil and gas, what we call conventional oil and gas production, so when you think of production in like, you know, Saudi Arabia or Russia, that type of production is with a vertical well just drilled into the subsurface, and that targets hydrocarbons that have been trapped, usually in some kind of like a structural trap.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_03: So if you think of an anticline, you know, the rocks are curving, the hydrocarbons have formed in a source rock and have migrated and then are trapped there, and then a well is drilled and the fluids are sucked out, like kind of with a straw, basically.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_03: And you can there's a pump jack on the surface, and you're thinking like it's like landman and fluids are being pumped out.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, sorry.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_03: I have so much I want to ask you.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_03: I know, I know, I know.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_03: Shockingly accurate, after many trips to Midland, I can say landman is not that far from reality.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_02: We're we're gonna have a talk of the we're Jesse.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_02: We have to circle back to this because I want to ask her about landman.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 30:08
  SPEAKER_03: But what what so what conventional oil, and you know, I don't know the demographic of all of your listener group, but in the mid-60s and 70s, there was this panic about peak oil, right?
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody was like, the U.S.
• 30:21
  SPEAKER_03: is gonna run out of oil in 1970.
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_03: And if you look at conventional oil production, it peaked in 1970 and started to decline.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_03: And for 38 years after that, U.S.
• 30:33
  SPEAKER_03: oil production declined.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_03: And what kind of revolutionized oil and gas in the US is this idea of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
• 30:42
  SPEAKER_03: And so rather than targeting these reservoirs that fluids have migrated into, operators started to target the source rocks themselves.
• 30:50
  SPEAKER_03: So these are they don't have a lot of porosity or permeability.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_03: And so by that I mean pore space, so holes in the rocks themselves that actually hold hydrocarbons, and permeability is like connection for those pores.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_03: So the fluids don't move very well out of these shales.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_03: There's a lot of clay in them, so they're not, you can't just drill a vertical well and produce.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_03: But what operators do is they drill horizontally to target more of that formation to increase the the amount of their well that's in the in the source rock, and then kind of isolate a section of the horizontal well and they create mini explosions that uh that kind of open up the side of the well bore and then pump in water at high volumes and high rates and create fractures.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_03: So it is really what it sounds like it's hydraulic fracturing, creating an artificial permeability network in the subsurface.
• 31:41
  SPEAKER_03: And then they pump in something kind of like sand to prop open those fractures so they don't collapse.
• 31:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, we're talking miles underground, and so there's a lot of overburden pressure.
• 31:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so you have to prop open those fractures, and then you can produce oil and gas.
• 31:58
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, and this is a it was a huge revolution and a major change in kind of US energy altogether.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_03: I have others there's more I more I can say about that, but so Chris, hold on.
• 32:13
  SPEAKER_00: Let me just there that was a really that was a really great description, uh, especially of porosity and permeability.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_00: Can you uh touch on really quickly, Katie, wastewater reinjection?
• 32:24
  SPEAKER_00: Because you were just talking about that.
• 32:25
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just explain briefly what that is?
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so this is a really important part of the oil field process, kind of the oil, oil and gas process in and particularly in what we call unconventional production.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: That's like fracking.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_03: So these are like non the non-conventional techniques.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_00: So in conventional is fracking a small subset of unconventional?
• 32:46
  SPEAKER_00: Is there other stuff in in unconventional that's not correct?
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_03: Well, the terminology is not at all, not at all kind of well established.
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_03: And um, so you know, yes, you could have like methane hydrates, or I don't know, you could have like tight gas sands and all kinds of things that might be considered unconventional, but um but really I I mean just horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing.
• 33:10
  SPEAKER_01: But okay, fair enough.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_03: But okay, so one thing that happens, you know, when the fluids in the subsurface are not just hydrocarbons, they're partially hydrocarbons and they're partially water.
• 33:20
  SPEAKER_03: And this is not like really nice water, it's water with radioactive stuff in it, has a lot of organic matter.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_03: It's pretty nasty.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_03: It's a an industrial waste product, basically.
• 33:31
  SPEAKER_03: When you have conventional production, kind of with high porosity, high permeability, that wastewater is usually reinjected into those same formations to push oil from one well to another.
• 33:42
  SPEAKER_03: This is called enhanced oil recovery.
• 33:44
  SPEAKER_03: So this is like a technique.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, right.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_03: So they have this cycle, they produce from one well, they inject the wastewater in this one.
• 33:51
  SPEAKER_03: And this is like pressure balanced, right?
• 33:54
  SPEAKER_03: The amount that you're producing, you're putting back in.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's how wastewater is dealt with traditionally.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a lot of, there's always been wastewater production with oil and gas.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_03: The problem, and I would say the emergency now in U.S.
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_03: oil production is the fact that now that water can't be reinjected into the shales it's produced from.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_03: They don't have natural porosity and permeability.
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_02: They're not even though they're propped open, they let that doesn't work.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_03: You still propens are still there.
• 34:25
  SPEAKER_03: The propens are still there, but you have kind of a loss of your per porosity and permeability over time, and you can't access very far from the well bore, you know, in terms of injecting wastewater.
• 34:37
  SPEAKER_03: And importantly, they're still producing from these, right?
• 34:39
  SPEAKER_03: There are thousands of horizontal wells being drilled every year.
• 34:43
  SPEAKER_03: There's not connectivity between one well and another.
• 34:47
  SPEAKER_03: You know, your well is your well.
• 34:49
  SPEAKER_03: Um so what happens now, and and the area I work in is called the Permian Basin.
• 34:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's in West Texas and southeast New Mexico.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_03: It is producing 40% of U.S.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_03: oil right now.
• 35:01
  SPEAKER_03: And that is m more than 40%, close to 50%.
• 35:04
  SPEAKER_03: And this is huge.
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, your listeners, I don't know if they're aware, but the US is producing now more oil than any country in the world.
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_03: And not only that, more oil than any country in the world has ever produced in history.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_03: So, like currently.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_03: And so this basin kind of revolutionized US oil and gas, and it's important globally because it's there are liquefied natural gas exports.
• 35:28
  SPEAKER_03: So natural gas can be into a liquid and sent, you know, by boat.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_03: And the US had all these terminals built on the Gulf Coast.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them were to send to receive natural gas.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_03: Then the shale boom happened, and now we're and you know, now we can export.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I think, you know, so setting aside, this is a big caveat, setting aside concerns about climate, and I have stuff to say on that too, but you know, if you set that aside and think about US energy security and the importance of this shale revolution in the US, because, and particularly in light of COVID, you know, when we think about energy during COVID, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Germany currently having, you know, economic challenges, mainly due to high energy costs, being a producer of a lot of our own energy is energy security, is is often, I think, often an overlooked part of consideration in the energy mix.
• 36:25
  SPEAKER_00: So you you described the the sorry because the emergency of wastewater reinjection.
• 36:31
  SPEAKER_00: Why what's the emergency?
• 36:33
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, the emergency is in so you know I said that in these unconventionals, you can't reinject or they're not re-injecting into the formations they're producing from.
• 36:43
  SPEAKER_03: They have to inject into other reservoirs and shallower or deeper than the shales they're produced from.
• 36:50
  SPEAKER_03: And this poses a big challenge in some cases.
• 36:53
  SPEAKER_03: And by the way, the like three or four on average, three or four barrels of water produced for every single barrel of oil.
• 37:02
  SPEAKER_00: And in some areas, wow, I had no idea.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 37:04
  SPEAKER_03: So it's like three or four X.
• 37:07
  SPEAKER_02: Hold on, can we define that a second?
• 37:08
  SPEAKER_02: Are you talking about the produced water that comes back up after the fracking?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_02: That's yeah, yeah.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_03: Is that right?
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yes, yeah, exactly.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, produced water is kind of an umbrella for the frack water that's put in flowing back, so that's flowback water, and the formation waters that are produced.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_03: So a lot more comes back than you put in, but they're producing the formation waters as well.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_03: And in some places, this is not a big issue.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, like Jesse in the Marcellus shale in Pennsylvania, very little water is produced, and operators don't have such a big challenge.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_03: In West Texas, it's three to four barrels of water for every barrel of oil, and it has to go back in the ground.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_03: And the ground is already has fluids.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_03: And so the only thing that happens is you increase pressure.
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_03: And that results in kind of two different challenges.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and we're, you know, we're getting kind of technical, but injection, we see injection into deep reservoirs.
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_03: And this is not just in Texas, but this has happened in Oklahoma and Kansas.
• 38:11
  SPEAKER_03: Injection into deep reservoirs puts you closer to seismogenic basement.
• 38:16
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like the kind of crystalline bedrock underpinning these um sedimentary basins.
• 38:24
  SPEAKER_03: And those rocks are stiff and they have a lot of faults that you know have been lying dormant for millions and millions of years, and we're perturbing the pressure and the stress state that those faults are seeing.
• 38:36
  SPEAKER_03: And that's what's resulting in earthquakes.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_03: So that deep injection above basement.
• 38:40
  SPEAKER_03: How deep?
• 38:41
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, you know, tens of thousands of feet.
• 38:44
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 38:45
  SPEAKER_02: And we're only talking how deep are the um are the shale layers first.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so the basin, no, uh, yeah, on that order, there are two sub-basins in the Permian Basin region.
• 38:57
  SPEAKER_03: One's a bit deeper than the other, but at its max, like 25,000 feet is like the sedimentary thickness in these basins.
• 39:04
  SPEAKER_01: 25,000 feet.
• 39:06
  SPEAKER_03: But but these deep faults extend up shallowly into the strata that are used for deep injection.
• 39:12
  SPEAKER_03: So earthquakes there.
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_03: And shallow injection has its own problems.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it's near surface, it's near groundwater resources, it's into formations that companies have to drill through to get to their producing reservoirs.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_03: And this is a basin that has hundreds of thousands of old vertical well bores from conventional production decades ago.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_03: And those are potential fluid conduits to the surface.
• 39:40
  SPEAKER_03: And that's that's why I talked about a blowout.
• 39:43
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, there you'll see on the news uh surface flows or well blowouts of injected fluid on the ground surface coming from the shallow injection reservoir through some pathway, usually an artificial pathway, because there's so many of these old wells drilled onto the ground surface, but through groundwater resources that are hopefully protected with casing.
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_03: But this is a huge challenge.
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_03: And I want to give some context here for the volumes because it might blow your mind.
• 40:13
  SPEAKER_03: But in the Permian Basin right now, we are seeing 16 million barrels a day of water being injected.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_03: And so if 15 million barrels of water a day.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_03: So if you spread that across the day evenly, which it's not, but if you do spread it across your 24-hour day, that's like an Olympic-sized swimming pool every like minute or two.
• 40:38
  unknown: Wow.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_02: Just in the Permian Basin.
• 40:40
  SPEAKER_03: Just in the Permian Basin.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_03: Right.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_02: So in the amount of if you're injecting 16 million barrels per day, how much is produced?
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_02: How much comes back?
• 40:51
  SPEAKER_02: Which is the real that's the real problem, right?
• 40:53
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, or that's one of the problems.
• 40:55
  SPEAKER_03: The uh that that injection number is what's injected for disposal, for permanent disposal.
• 41:01
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, yeah.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, yeah, that's what's injected.
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_03: So about 20, about 20 million barrels a day of water is coming out of the ground.
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_03: Some of that is recycled and reused in hydraulic fracturing, but the vast majority is injected for permanent disposal.
• 41:19
  SPEAKER_00: So th this is so there's many reasons, many like concerns of this, but the earthquake thing that you talked about.
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_00: So induced seismicity, right?
• 41:26
  SPEAKER_00: That's the term we can use here.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, how so I I did uh my PhD at the University of Alberta, and there was a I think there was like uh the Alberta Geological Survey had uh a blossoming interest in induced seismicity, like tracking it and stuff.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_00: And I remember a talk where somebody had said that they could track, they kind of could see seismically the injection, and then they could kind of track the fault propagating.
• 41:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, these are all really, really small earthquakes, like one, two, three, something like that.
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: But it it's very cool to watch this thing kind of propagating along some fault.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_00: But they had suggested at the time, and this is going back many years now, that they didn't think that anything larger than like a five could be produced by induced seismicity.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: Is that still I mean, is that a number that resonates with you, or do you think that like the these big basement faults that you're talking about, the or potentially big ones, I guess, are they a known concern?
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: Do you uh like has it happened before?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_00: Has a big one gone off because of induced seismicity or potentially related to it?
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, yeah.
• 42:34
  SPEAKER_03: Oh yeah, that's well documented and well accepted by industry and well, you know.
• 42:39
  SPEAKER_03: Um absolutely.
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, induced the largest induced event we've had in West Texas was a 5.4.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big earthquake to be.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: Yes.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_03: That's a big earthquake.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: 5.4, okay.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_00: And and where did was that one of these deep basement ones, or was it a shallow one?
• 42:55
  SPEAKER_03: It was a deep basement fault.
• 42:57
  SPEAKER_03: We published a paper on this in June in uh a journal called Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems, where we model the pore pressure increase with deep injection.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_03: But this area where this earthquake occurred is really quite challenging because there aren't any really nearby deep injection wells.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_03: They're all 10 miles away.
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and so we're talking long distances that fluids or pressures have migrated to cause rupture of these faults.
• 43:24
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, in terms of what's possible, the the size of an earthquake is dependent on the size of the slipped patch, the rupture patch, and the stress drop.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, the like larger magnitudes are possible, of course, on big faults, especially.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_03: It's feasible, but um, but a 5.4 is the the biggest we've seen.
• 43:43
  SPEAKER_03: We track um go ahead.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, is the mechanism sorry, Chris.
• 43:49
  SPEAKER_00: I know I keep interrupting here, but again, just one is the mechanism I'm kind of imagining this like faults that are locked, that haven't ruptured or have built up some amount of stress, but but That you're just kind of adding water to them and you're making them slippery?
• 44:04
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a that's a really terrible analogy.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_00: Is that at all accurate to what the mechanism is that's in that's creating the earthquake?
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: And and is there like another natural example of this?
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because this seems to me like a really unique situation for creating earthquakes.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: So is the mechanism of this or these earthquakes the same as normal earthquakes we think of that natural earthquakes, or is it totally different?
• 44:29
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh it yeah, it's it's the same in some ways and it's different in some ways.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a lot of nuance here in induced seismicity science.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_03: So these earthquakes can be caused.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_03: So induced seismicity just means any earthquake that's caused by kind of human anthropogenic activity, right?
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_03: They've been induced or caused by something.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, you could even call seismicity picked up by a jumping at a Taylor Swift concert, kind of induced seismicity.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_00: So Chris has done Taylor Swift induced seismicity before.
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_00: I guarantee you, him and Jenny have induced some Taylor Swift seismicity.
• 45:03
  SPEAKER_02: 100%.
• 45:04
  SPEAKER_03: That's great.
• 45:06
  SPEAKER_03: And don't quote me on this because that's not really induced seismicity, but the point, you know, the point being that there are many different ways you we have seen earthquakes in uh like in the Gronigan gas field in the Netherlands from depletion.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_03: So fluids are pulled out of the reservoir.
• 45:20
  SPEAKER_03: It's kind of dependent on it's dependent on stress state, and so you know, that's the how this the magnitude of the stresses in the earth's crust and how they're oriented.
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_03: So that matters a lot, and that matters in relation to your fault, which is how uh it's angled in the ground and what its properties are.
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_03: But the mechanism can be production of fluids, it can be hydraulic fracturing itself if you directly hit a fault.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_03: It's called a frack hit.
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um it's the pressure that you're that you're putting on the system, is what we're saying.
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, the pressure you're putting on or the pressure you're withdrawing.
• 45:54
  SPEAKER_03: It's a change in, so you know, not so much fluids themselves, but a pressure perturbation, an increase in pore pressure.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_03: It can also be caused by not direct pressure diffusion, but by what we call poroelastic stressing.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_03: So that's changes in the stress as a result of pressure increases, but that is kind of a different mechanism.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_03: So there are many different ways that can be yeah, and lubing it up isn't one of them, is what you're saying, because I'm not taking it off the table, but you know, when we you know, there there are certainly cases where injection is occurring right on faults, but in general, operators are trying not to inject their fluids directly in a critically stressed fault, right?
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody's trying to do that.
• 46:42
  SPEAKER_03: And some of these cases of far-field pressure diffusion are more kind of we're finding they're quite quite common in these injection systems.
• 46:51
  SPEAKER_00: So these these these kind of faults are just sitting right on this tipping point of stability, and a little bit of pressure from one direction can kind of make them go in in some way, shape, or form.
• 47:00
  SPEAKER_03: And our and I mean our models, all my colleagues say all models are wrong, some models are useful.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_03: Someone famous probably said that before.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_03: Our models are useful, but they're wrong.
• 47:10
  SPEAKER_03: But our models are are calibrated with in some cases downhole pressure gauge data that operators provide.
• 47:17
  SPEAKER_03: And some of these earthquakes, some of the big ones are occurring, we think, at tens of PSI pressure change.
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_03: So that's like less than the amount of pressure in a bike tire.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: Oh my gosh.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:31
  SPEAKER_00: How much pressure in PSI is is down there?
• 47:34
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I I can I only think in like GPS or kilo kilograms.
• 47:38
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah, what is the pressure?
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_03: PA or PSI.
• 47:41
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna after after we wrap up, you're gonna have to go do a conversion from like kilobars to bike tire pressure.
• 47:49
  SPEAKER_00: How many bike tire pressures is it down there?
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: But that's so small.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 47:53
  SPEAKER_03: Well yes, it's small.
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_03: It's uh so obviously the absolute pressure is dependent on the depth, and these there's a lot of structure in these basins.
• 48:02
  SPEAKER_03: So it's hard to generalize what the initial reservoir pressure is kind of across the basin.
• 48:08
  SPEAKER_03: But what we see in the shallow injection reservoirs, which have a lower initial pressure, of course, because they're shallower, is that injection has caused an increase of up to 40% of the initial reservoir pressure.
• 48:21
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, if you think of that that initial kind of what was hydrostatic or maybe artesian pore pressure, um increase it by four.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_03: So that is quite astronomical.
• 48:32
  SPEAKER_03: There are so I have two questions.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_02: Um shoot, I just lost the first one.
• 48:38
  SPEAKER_02: So I'll go to the second one for it.
• 48:40
  SPEAKER_02: Just classic old man Chris over there.
• 48:44
  SPEAKER_00: The old man's forgetting what he's gonna say.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_02: Don't even start.
• 48:47
  SPEAKER_02: Um, I have it.
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_02: I know, I got it, I got it.
• 48:50
  SPEAKER_02: So um the ones that are on that tipping point, like you said less than 10 PSI.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_02: Is there a correlation then between that and the size of the magnitude of the earthquake?
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_03: This uh, that's a really interesting question.
• 49:06
  SPEAKER_03: Um not that I I can't think of that that would be the case uh necessarily.
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_03: There's certainly a correlation between that and the occurrence of earthquakes at all.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_03: But you know, other complicated things happen when you you have like what's something called stress transfer, earthquake to earthquake triggering.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_03: So kind of once you kick off a fault, it starts to get complicated quite quickly.
• 49:31
  SPEAKER_03: And uh and in how stresses are transferred.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm not aware of that.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_03: It's certainly really important how you know the fault is oriented relative to the stresses in the earth's crust.
• 49:44
  SPEAKER_03: So we would say optimally oriented, and we can pick out faults that we map based on what we know about the stress field, and we can say those would be pretty likely to slip.
• 49:52
  SPEAKER_03: And indeed, those are the faults that slip.
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_03: Relation to magnitude, I haven't observed that, and I can't think why that would be the case, but someone will probably call you and tell you I'm wrong.
• 50:03
  unknown: Okay.
• 50:04
  SPEAKER_02: Second question was the hold on, I got I'm not done yet.
• 50:06
  SPEAKER_02: I gotta ask the second part of it.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_02: The subsidence part.
• 50:10
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, does that are you able to isolate out the seismicity from like fault-induced stuff and just simply subsidence from depleting the resource out of the ground?
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, good question.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_03: So, some um we can see a signal from earthquakes in some cases, and you see them because they're pretty localized and they're occurring right above earthquakes themselves.
• 50:34
  SPEAKER_03: And so we can see a signal of subsidence in some cases.
• 50:38
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, for shallower faults, we can actually map faults based on surface lineaments that you see on in satellite data.
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_03: So that's a big part of one of my colleagues, Lily Horn, does the our our work on um mapping faults using all types of data.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_03: Surface deformation is part of that.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_03: And then we we've published papers as well on kind of disentangling these different effects of uh seismicity versus um depletion, so producing fluids versus injecting fluids, and all of these things are occurring, you know, in the same patch of ground.
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_03: And so it is complicated.
• 51:17
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, there are certainly cases where we could isolate one or the other if the other operations aren't occurring, and that helps us to calibrate our models, um, but oftentimes it's pretty complex.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, I think this is probably gonna be a stupid question, but do you see a typical type of movement along a fault like normal reverse strike slip?
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Is there in the Permian basin, is there a typical orientation or deformation style to the faulting that you see?
• 51:42
  SPEAKER_03: That's not a stupid question at all.
• 51:43
  SPEAKER_03: It's a great question.
• 51:44
  SPEAKER_03: Uh the Permian Basin stress field is quite interesting.
• 51:48
  SPEAKER_03: There's uh it transitions from a kind of normal faulting regime to a strike-slip faulting regime from west to east.
• 51:56
  SPEAKER_03: So we see both.
• 51:57
  SPEAKER_03: And and the focal mechanism data is really helpful for us to understand how those faults are moving.
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_03: Um, you know, just based on earth's.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: How do you track that?
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_00: Is that is that I mean, I think most people think of sedimentary basins like, okay, these are stable, calm, nothing's happening, interior of the continent.
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: How are you tracking that?
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_00: Is that GPS?
• 52:14
  SPEAKER_00: Is that like the size?
• 52:16
  SPEAKER_00: Is that borehole pressure data?
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_03: Seismicity or stresses, you mean?
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_03: Stresses.
• 52:22
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, so stresses we you know, we do a little bit of work, but we rely on published data that comes out, like you know, US-based stress mapping work, some of it using borehole data, uh like resistivity image logs.
• 52:35
  SPEAKER_03: You can basically image inside a well bore in in 360, and so you can lay that out and see a view, and you can tell by in which quadrant of your image fractures have formed.
• 52:49
  SPEAKER_03: For example, you might have tensile cracks that form as the well is drilled itself.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_03: And from that, you can tell orientations of principal stresses.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_03: For example, we do some work, we published a paper in 2021 on vertical stress or the overburden pressure, and we use density log data.
• 53:07
  SPEAKER_03: So that's just how dense and uh are the rocks above and what's the pressure they're exerting.
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_03: So we have some contributions in that, but we use published data as well.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_03: And then, and then of course the earthquake data adds into that stress mapping effort too.
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_03: But it's not a stupid question.
• 53:23
  SPEAKER_03: It's both normal to normal to strike slip across the basin, and there's an interesting actual rotation in the azimuth of the, this is too technical, the azimuth of the maximum horizontal stress um in that basin that's probably like tectonically inherited.
• 53:40
  SPEAKER_03: So that's all that's all too disentangled by our structural geologists.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's a you d you just saying this.
• 53:48
  SPEAKER_00: I I I had not I I had uh maybe an immature understanding of how valuable structural geology is actually to borehole data and how important it is to you know these rocks and knowing where the fluid's gonna go.
• 54:01
  SPEAKER_03: Yep, huge, invaluable.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, uh so it why is fracking so polarizing?
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_02: I mean, it's it's so politicized.
• 54:12
  SPEAKER_02: Is there validity to this?
• 54:14
  SPEAKER_02: You know, the the downside to fracking?
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_02: Uh like can you talk about that?
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, uh there are I don't okay, hydrocarbons, high fossil fuels, let's say fossil fuels um clearly have environmental impacts.
• 54:32
  SPEAKER_03: There's no question to that, right?
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_03: The impacts on the climate are one thing, and that that's a big thing.
• 54:38
  SPEAKER_03: Fracking itself, I think in some cases has gotten a bad rap.
• 54:42
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm not so sure why, because compared to conventional oil and gas operations, it's not really you know that different.
• 54:49
  SPEAKER_03: We're kind of perturbing the subsurface, we're producing fluids, that's a resource.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_03: And so I'm not I'm not quite sure about that.
• 54:58
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, causing earthquakes is is of course occurring by you know hydraulic fracturing.
• 55:04
  SPEAKER_03: Most of these are pretty low magnitude earthquakes.
• 55:07
  SPEAKER_03: The the large magnitude stuff is associated with wastewater injection.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 55:11
  SPEAKER_03: So I don't know.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_03: I just I think that there needs to be nuance in this discussion because the climate consideration is real.
• 55:18
  SPEAKER_03: But if you look at a plot of US GDP, right, it's gone up.
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_03: And US CO2 emissions have not.
• 55:27
  SPEAKER_03: They've been decreasing since the mid-2000s.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I don't know, you know, if this is news to anyone, maybe everybody knows this, despite not signing on to a lot of like climate agreements, the US has decreased CO2 emissions.
• 55:39
  SPEAKER_03: And if you think of CO2 emissions coming from like three main sectors, one is like industrial products and one is transportation and one is electricity, the decrease has come exclusively from a decrease in CO2 emissions from electricity.
• 55:54
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, that's important.
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: Why?
• 55:56
  SPEAKER_03: You know why?
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_03: Do you know why?
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_03: Why is CO2 why is CO2 gone down?
• 56:03
  SPEAKER_02: Natural gas.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_03: Natural gas.
• 56:05
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, right.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, I think that this it's not it's not fracking, it's not solar energy, it's not wind energy, right?
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_02: But it's also not coal.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: It's not coal.
• 56:16
  SPEAKER_02: Right, exactly.
• 56:18
  SPEAKER_02: And thank God it's not.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_02: But what about what about the I was trying to get at groundwater?
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_02: Uh the concerns that uh uh with fracking, everybody is so concerned about their the water that we use for for drinking water, you know, for for properties and for farms and for agriculture, all that kind of stuff.
• 56:36
  SPEAKER_02: So does fracking, you know, that I guess that's what I want to do.
• 56:39
  SPEAKER_02: I see a little bit.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_02: Okay.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_03: I thought you meant the climate impacts all.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that's my fault.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_03: I should have been clearer in that.
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_03: No, no, no, no, it's fine.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_03: Um both.
• 56:48
  SPEAKER_00: I'm curious with Chris's question, is there a regional difference?
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I know you study you you're intimately detailed with you know the Permian Basin.
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_00: And how how how do they compare?
• 56:57
  SPEAKER_00: How do different basins compare Williston to, you know, uh whatever the other ones are?
• 57:01
  SPEAKER_03: So yeah, there's a basin difference.
• 57:04
  SPEAKER_03: So and it's not necessarily just about the geology, it's about also the regulatory environment in a particular state, how well protected groundwater resources are, it's about um how populated the areas are.
• 57:18
  SPEAKER_03: There's a reason that fracking hasn't kicked off in England, right?
• 57:22
  SPEAKER_03: There are a lot of people, and there are a lot of people who don't get money from mineral rights when their stuff is produced.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_03: And there's a reason it's kicked off very well in West Texas.
• 57:30
  SPEAKER_03: There are not a lot of people, and there are a lot of ranchers who now own private jets to get to their ranches.
• 57:36
  SPEAKER_00: So that's right.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: Because they sold the rights to the mineral rights or the oil and gas underneath.
• 57:41
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, they had the mineral rights, so they get paid for the oil.
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_03: There's an economic incentive and there's a benefit to the communities there.
• 57:48
  SPEAKER_03: And a magnitude 5.4 in England or in Pennsylvania, you know, that looks very different than a magnitude 5.4 in far west Texas.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_03: It's still important, but it's different.
• 57:58
  SPEAKER_03: So, but you know, the regulations are different.
• 58:00
  SPEAKER_03: In Pennsylvania, for example, I visited a drilling rig in the Marcella Shale, which is one of the main producing shales.
• 58:08
  SPEAKER_03: Um, cleanest place I've ever been.
• 58:11
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, the whole patch of ground had been reclaimed, it had been re-vegetated.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_03: There was one kind of well head that was regularly monitored.
• 58:20
  SPEAKER_03: And if you spill a gallon of water out there, you have to report it.
• 58:24
  SPEAKER_03: You know, it was very, a very tightly run ship.
• 58:26
  SPEAKER_03: And and, you know, people are understandably concerned about making sure that the regulations are in place to protect groundwater resources, for example, right?
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_03: There are and yeah, go ahead.
• 58:39
  SPEAKER_00: On that note, I I just have a question building on that, because I I was recently sort of brought to light to me how many I mean, Pennsylvania had the first oil well ever, and there are so many really unknown, unmonitored uh legacy wells and legacy boarheads and stuff like that around.
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering, you know, do is part of the groundwater problem that people see in areas like this, where there's a huge old legacy of holes in the ground, could it be in part due to that?
• 59:08
  SPEAKER_00: Not maybe not because of fracking necessarily, or or it's a trickle-on effect of that, that you've got all these holes in the ground already that nobody knows where they are and uh the stuff's getting out.
• 59:18
  SPEAKER_00: And does West Texas have that same problem?
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is it I don't know the oil history of West Texas?
• 59:23
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_03: It's got a long, you know, many decades of uh of potential production too.
• 59:28
  SPEAKER_03: Right, you're exactly right.
• 59:30
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, my biggest concern, and this is part of what I do, is understanding the impacts of injection on and the reservoir dynamics of injection, what's happening in the ground in underground.
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_03: My biggest concern is aging vertical wells.
• 59:44
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them are orphaned, some of them are abandoned, some of them are not even known except for maybe a dot on a map, but no one even has identifying information for that well.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody knows how well the borehole is cased.
• 59:57
  SPEAKER_03: So this is a huge part of our work now.
• 1:00:00
  SPEAKER_03: And in fact, when I go to conferences, I'm often speaking in sessions on risk to orphan and abandoned wells and how injection is kind of increasing that risk in certain areas.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_02: Okay, what what do you what exactly do you mean?
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_02: Why are you worried about these old, old wells?
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_03: Because they serve as fluid migration pathways.
• 1:00:18
  SPEAKER_03: They essentially are artificial connectivity between the subsurface, right?
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_03: The groundwater resource in a modern well, in a well that's fracked, groundwater resources are very well protected.
• 1:00:31
  SPEAKER_03: The wells are cased, they're cemented, and the resources are well protected.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_03: So I'm far less concerned about fracking than I am about orphaned and abandoned wells where we don't know how well they were plugged, how well the casing, is the casing, has it corroded and degraded over?
• 1:00:48
  SPEAKER_00: What is casing?
• 1:00:49
  SPEAKER_00: Can you just visualize casing for us?
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:00:52
  SPEAKER_03: Like it's literally, literally just like what you think of it as.
• 1:00:55
  SPEAKER_03: So there are many, you know, many ways in which a well can protect the groundwater resources around it.
• 1:01:01
  SPEAKER_03: But, you know, wells always have protective things around it, and there might be multiple of those of different types of materials that are protecting those resources so that you're only actually in fluid connectivity with the formations that you would like to be.
• 1:01:18
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_00: So you have to concrete straw going all the way down, protecting or something that okay.
• 1:01:23
  SPEAKER_00: Exactly.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_03: You have to protect all of the other formations.
• 1:01:27
  SPEAKER_03: And you might be drilling through 3,000 feet of evaporites.
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_03: And we all know what happens to salt when it's in contact with fluids, right?
• 1:01:34
  SPEAKER_03: All of these formations are very strongly protected in modern wells.
• 1:01:38
  SPEAKER_03: But in older wells, you know, we might not have information about how they were constructed, about whether the casing has degraded over time, whether pressure increases from injection have caused challenges to the integrity of those wells.
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_03: So it's that's the thing that keeps it.
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_02: When you talked about earlier, which I didn't know, how we use uh injection in a conventional well to push the resource that we're after somewhere else, is that what you're concerned about?
• 1:02:09
  SPEAKER_02: Is this this kind of migration of fluids that then has a conduit to the surface?
• 1:02:14
  SPEAKER_03: Not so much active wells.
• 1:02:15
  SPEAKER_03: If if they're being, you know, if a well is owned by a company, if it's it's known that it's there, they'll have some kind of understanding of the integrity of the well.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_03: They'll have um you know regular reporting about the status of the well.
• 1:02:29
  SPEAKER_03: It's not those so much.
• 1:02:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of inactive wells.
• 1:02:35
  SPEAKER_03: They're not producing, they're not injecting, they're in some cases abandoned by operators.
• 1:02:40
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody claims them, nobody owns them.
• 1:02:43
  SPEAKER_03: And in some cases, nobody even knows they're there.
• 1:02:46
  SPEAKER_03: So there's a whole industry now on using like airborne detection techniques to try to find these wells, like monitoring for methane leaks to figure out where these orphaned wells are.
• 1:02:57
  SPEAKER_03: So those are the things that keep me up, not modern fracking wells.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:03:02
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:03:03
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's a valuable perspective.
• 1:03:05
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I that's very there's an interesting nuance to to this you know, fracking discussion.
• 1:03:11
  SPEAKER_00: Have you seen the the sort of conversation about fracking change over your career and evolve in one direction or the other?
• 1:03:20
  SPEAKER_03: Um yeah, that's a good question.
• 1:03:22
  SPEAKER_03: I I mean, I'm in it in I'm in it in Texas.
• 1:03:26
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, the conversation is fairly one-sided, I would say.
• 1:03:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right, fair enough.
• 1:03:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:03:33
  SPEAKER_03: What I will say is I have seen the conversation around the challenges associated with fracking to have changed over time.
• 1:03:41
  SPEAKER_03: So, firstly, one thing I've noted is the public understanding of what is going on has really improved, right?
• 1:03:49
  SPEAKER_03: In the early days of earthquakes in the Fort Worth basin around the Dallas-Fort Worth area.
• 1:03:54
  SPEAKER_03: These were concerning earthquakes because that's a metro area and these earthquakes were not that far from the airport.
• 1:04:00
  SPEAKER_03: So, this was a whole thing that kicked off this induced seismicity kind of problem.
• 1:04:05
  SPEAKER_03: Um, there was a lot of reticence to acknowledge that there was a role of oil and gas in to play in this, and a lot of hesitation to talk about it, not a lot of kind of accountability.
• 1:04:18
  SPEAKER_03: And on the part of the media and kind of the general public discourse, there was a real lack of understanding of what was happening.
• 1:04:24
  SPEAKER_03: So, you know, the early headlines are like fracking causes earthquakes.
• 1:04:28
  SPEAKER_03: And I think the nuance is important, right?
• 1:04:30
  SPEAKER_03: It's it's actually not fracking that's causing earthquakes, it's how we're managing our water.
• 1:04:34
  SPEAKER_03: There's a reason fracking in Pennsylvania isn't causing earthquakes, right?
• 1:04:39
  SPEAKER_03: Because we're not re-injecting 16 million barrels a day of water into the into aquifers sitting right above seismogenic basement.
• 1:04:47
  SPEAKER_03: So that nuance has improved, but the public now, at least in the areas I work in, has a very good understanding of what's going on.
• 1:04:55
  SPEAKER_03: And the the media are much better about capturing that nuance, I think.
• 1:05:00
  SPEAKER_03: Companies have come so far and are now leading the way, really, in many ways, and talking openly about this.
• 1:05:06
  SPEAKER_03: Because here's the thing it's a business threat if there's a magnitude 5.4 earthquake.
• 1:05:11
  SPEAKER_03: Nobody wants that to happen.
• 1:05:12
  SPEAKER_00: Um kidding.
• 1:05:14
  SPEAKER_03: And I think, you know, pushing ahead the science and really kind of understanding what's happening and then mitigating down.
• 1:05:20
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, just to tell you how much I think this is not like tooting the horn of the oil industry, but the from about 2021 until the third quarter of 2024, so like, you know, those several years, the rate of magnitude three earthquakes in Texas was hovering at about like 18 a month.
• 1:05:40
  SPEAKER_03: Okay.
• 1:05:41
  SPEAKER_03: All almost all induced, hovering right around there.
• 1:05:45
  SPEAKER_03: And in 2022, regulators and operators got really serious about this induced seismicity problem.
• 1:05:51
  SPEAKER_03: And they said, we know now that deep injection is a problem.
• 1:05:55
  SPEAKER_03: We're gonna back off deep injection, we're gonna divert our fluid volumes to other reservoirs.
• 1:06:00
  SPEAKER_03: And the regulator said we're going to pull permits in in areas near really active faults.
• 1:06:05
  SPEAKER_03: And in the third quarter of last year, I just plotted the earthquake data, there were like nine per month.
• 1:06:11
  SPEAKER_03: So a 50% decrease.
• 1:06:13
  SPEAKER_03: And they're taking it seriously to kind of mitigate that problem.
• 1:06:17
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, any subsurface activity has the risk of induced seismicity.
• 1:06:22
  SPEAKER_03: There have been induced earthquakes with geothermal.
• 1:06:25
  SPEAKER_03: There certainly will be probably induced earthquakes with CO2 injection, carbon factor, and storage.
• 1:06:31
  SPEAKER_03: Anytime we we are perturbing the fluids of the subsurface, we have this risk.
• 1:06:36
  SPEAKER_03: And so, you know, I think acknowledging that and and helping, you know, these operators in whatever industry this is kind of not lose their social license to operate by being irresponsible is kind of part of what we do.
• 1:06:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:50
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, wow.
• 1:06:51
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, what an interesting okay, we're we're running over your time here.
• 1:06:54
  SPEAKER_00: Um so I just two more questions, Katie, and then we'll go.
• 1:06:57
  SPEAKER_00: Real quick ones.
• 1:06:58
  SPEAKER_00: You sit at this really interesting and very important intersection, as we described earlier, like between the academic life and the the industry.
• 1:07:06
  SPEAKER_00: What is the value of a geoscience degree to students, either undergrad or graduate degree from your chair?
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:07:14
  SPEAKER_00: And how and what and is that like what's the future of that?
• 1:07:17
  SPEAKER_00: Is that you know a good place to be and for students?
• 1:07:20
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:07:21
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think that there has ever been a time, you know, certainly not in my lifetime, where geoscience is more critical to the future of the U.S.
• 1:07:30
  SPEAKER_03: And I talked a bit about energy security, um, but also, you know, alternative energies, clean energies, critical minerals, any of these types of things require and not just geoscience, but you know, specifically I'm in the subsurface geoscience world.
• 1:07:45
  SPEAKER_03: I could not have imagined 10 years ago that, you know, I would have developed this expertise in induced seismicity from oil and gas.
• 1:07:52
  SPEAKER_03: And now, because we understand what's happening in oil and gas, I can pivot that to geothermal, enhanced geothermal systems where fluids are being injected to produce heat, right?
• 1:08:04
  SPEAKER_03: And that's a potentially really important energy source or carbon capture and storage.
• 1:08:09
  SPEAKER_03: And the skill set is all the same.
• 1:08:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I, you know, I work in uh a place where my organization, the Bureau of Economic Geology, has three main foci uh energy, the environment, uh, and economics.
• 1:08:23
  SPEAKER_03: And so I we work across a range of disciplines with all of those types of people, and we work with engineers.
• 1:08:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I would say the value of geoscience is is obviously there for majors.
• 1:08:35
  SPEAKER_03: The challenges of geoscience that geoscience can address are like firmly in the future.
• 1:08:40
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, let's go get them.
• 1:08:42
  SPEAKER_03: But not only that, folks in these other disciplines, having as much geoscience background as people can is really critical.
• 1:08:51
  SPEAKER_03: Um, the best engineers that I work with who model pore pressure changes have some kind of geologic background.
• 1:08:57
  SPEAKER_03: The best economists that I work with, you know, they understand the subsurface characteristics that make wells good or bad.
• 1:09:04
  SPEAKER_03: They know what porosity and permeability are.
• 1:09:06
  SPEAKER_03: And, you know, I talk to investment bankers, the best investment bankers have enough geoscience background to understand what makes for profitable oil wells or or how they need to like risk their assets based on the likelihood of an earthquake.
• 1:09:20
  SPEAKER_03: So if you're gonna be an investment banker, I would suggest a geoscience course.
• 1:09:24
  SPEAKER_03: I just see the value across all of these disciplines.
• 1:09:28
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:09:29
  SPEAKER_03: And even I'm biased now, but even more so, all of the great science I think is being done on these margins where disciplines are kind of overlapping and coming together.
• 1:09:40
  SPEAKER_03: And I think of myself as a generalist.
• 1:09:42
  SPEAKER_03: I do a lot of different things in my job.
• 1:09:44
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and I just think that that's it's more fun, and it's also just a really useful skill to be able to talk to different people in different disciplines.
• 1:09:53
  SPEAKER_00: So well, that was one of the best answers I've heard for that question.
• 1:09:56
  SPEAKER_00: I'm all excited, Chris.
• 1:09:57
  SPEAKER_00: What do what do you think?
• 1:09:58
  SPEAKER_02: I want to let's go.
• 1:10:00
  SPEAKER_02: That's right.
• 1:10:01
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: I like that.
• 1:10:02
  SPEAKER_00: You know, all the problems are far in the future.
• 1:10:04
  SPEAKER_00: Let's go get them.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:10:05
  SPEAKER_03: That's let's go get them.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_00: I love that.
• 1:10:07
  SPEAKER_00: That's amazing.
• 1:10:08
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right.
• 1:10:09
  SPEAKER_00: I'm inspired.
• 1:10:10
  SPEAKER_00: Uh, you got me reinvigorated for the week, you know.
• 1:10:12
  SPEAKER_00: This is good.
• 1:10:13
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: Go do your job.
• 1:10:14
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah.
• 1:10:15
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:10:16
  SPEAKER_02: Go teach him up.
• 1:10:17
  SPEAKER_02: Chris needs to be.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:10:20
  SPEAKER_02: Um, Katie, what'd you think of Landman?
• 1:10:23
  SPEAKER_03: I loved Landman for like the first three episodes.
• 1:10:27
  SPEAKER_03: And then there was like not enough oil field action and too much other action.
• 1:10:31
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, I want more oil field.
• 1:10:33
  SPEAKER_02: But did you get to the point where Billy Bob Thornton talks about the windmills and all that he goes on a rant?
• 1:10:40
  SPEAKER_02: Did you get to that point?
• 1:10:42
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, he goes on a rant.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_03: He does.
• 1:10:43
  SPEAKER_03: He does his, you know, clearly Landman is is kind of targeted for a specific group of people, but it's wildly entertaining, I thought.
• 1:10:53
  SPEAKER_03: And um did I, yeah.
• 1:10:56
  SPEAKER_03: As as someone who flies into Midland, Texas fairly regularly, you know, several times a year at least, um, I a lot of it resonated with me.
• 1:11:05
  SPEAKER_03: I was like, yeah, yeah, this is this is the vibe.
• 1:11:09
  SPEAKER_03: I don't, you know, I hope not not I hope not quite that many people die out on drilling rigs, but um it's funny.
• 1:11:16
  SPEAKER_03: I we I watched it with my husband, and every 10 minutes we were pausing and he was saying, Does that really happen?
• 1:11:21
  SPEAKER_03: And does this really happen?
• 1:11:22
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like the fact checker.
• 1:11:25
  SPEAKER_02: That's great.
• 1:11:26
  SPEAKER_02: Um, is the patch a real place?
• 1:11:30
  SPEAKER_03: Uh okay.
• 1:11:31
  SPEAKER_03: Interestingly, I was on a call recently and I I have never been to the patch, and I've never heard of the patch, but I was on a call recently with folks in Midland who were talking about I don't know if it's the the actual thing or kind of the equivalent of that, but there is an equivalent of that that is a place people go.
• 1:11:46
  SPEAKER_03: And the coffee shop as well.
• 1:11:47
  SPEAKER_03: I think a thing like that exists, the drive-thru coffee shop situation.
• 1:11:52
  SPEAKER_02: So you have to go, you have to go to the patch.
• 1:11:54
  SPEAKER_02: You have to, yeah.
• 1:11:55
  SPEAKER_03: Oh my god.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_03: I need to look up now.
• 1:11:56
  SPEAKER_03: I I don't I this is I have never been, I don't know if that's a real place or it's just based on it.
• 1:12:03
  SPEAKER_03: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, all right.
• 1:12:04
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, okay.
• 1:12:05
  SPEAKER_00: That's awesome.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_02: All right.
• 1:12:06
  SPEAKER_02: Well, Katie, that brings us to our last question.
• 1:12:09
  SPEAKER_02: Um, what we always end with this.
• 1:12:12
  SPEAKER_02: So what's been your best day as a geoscientist?
• 1:12:16
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's a really hard question to end on.
• 1:12:18
  SPEAKER_02: Um yes.
• 1:12:20
  SPEAKER_03: I don't know if I can pick the best days.
• 1:12:22
  SPEAKER_03: Uh look, I've had a lot of great days, and I think and I talk with my colleagues that the goal really is to just string together enough good days to make it all worthwhile.
• 1:12:31
  SPEAKER_03: And so that's my goal.
• 1:12:32
  SPEAKER_03: I like to string together a lot of a lot of good days.
• 1:12:35
  SPEAKER_03: I've had a couple of great ones lately.
• 1:12:37
  SPEAKER_03: I had a I got a stack of letters from my daughter's fifth grade class at our local school, and they were doing a formal letter writing thing on natural disasters.
• 1:12:46
  SPEAKER_03: And I love that, you know, I'm like their earthquake expert.
• 1:12:49
  SPEAKER_03: So I had this letters to respond to, and I thought, what a privilege that I've got these daughters who, you know, they think it's they still at least think it's cool that their mom works on earthquakes and they have their friends send me letters.
• 1:13:00
  SPEAKER_00: Um that's very cute.
• 1:13:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was a good one.
• 1:13:03
  SPEAKER_00: That's a great day.
• 1:13:04
  SPEAKER_00: That's that is a great day.
• 1:13:05
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, exactly.
• 1:13:06
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, then I had to actually write all the letters.
• 1:13:08
  SPEAKER_00: So what was what was the average fifth grader's question about earthquakes?
• 1:13:14
  SPEAKER_03: Um, some of them had really great questions.
• 1:13:17
  SPEAKER_03: Uh, some of them were interesting, and I got letters about volcanoes and all sorts of other natural disasters.
• 1:13:22
  SPEAKER_03: Some of them were like really good, and then some of them were like kind of difficult, like how much warning do we have?
• 1:13:28
  SPEAKER_03: And what are the ruling systems like?
• 1:13:31
  SPEAKER_03: And how do they get people out in time?
• 1:13:32
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, I don't really know how to respond and say, I'm sorry, but they don't.
• 1:13:39
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 1:13:40
  SPEAKER_00: Well, really, last question.
• 1:13:41
  SPEAKER_00: What did your uh geology professor husband think about you getting all the letters about geology-related things and not him?
• 1:13:48
  SPEAKER_03: He in his defense, he did also get a stack of letters.
• 1:13:51
  SPEAKER_03: He did get a stack of letters.
• 1:13:53
  SPEAKER_03: Um, and he painstakingly, he actually showed me up.
• 1:13:57
  SPEAKER_03: His stack was smaller than mine, but he painstakingly showed me up by like writing like three single-spaced full pages with like technical language.
• 1:14:08
  SPEAKER_01: Of course, yeah.
• 1:14:09
  SPEAKER_03: And like, this is taking a long time.
• 1:14:11
  SPEAKER_03: And I'm like, yeah, don't you want to chat GPT that or something?
• 1:14:15
  SPEAKER_01: Exactly.
• 1:14:16
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I was gonna say.
• 1:14:17
  SPEAKER_03: So, Jesse, you know him very well.
• 1:14:19
  SPEAKER_03: You know that he took his time on that.
• 1:14:21
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, oh, he takes his time.
• 1:14:22
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Andy overdid something.
• 1:14:24
  SPEAKER_00: No, that doesn't sound like it.
• 1:14:26
  SPEAKER_00: Um, that's great.
• 1:14:27
  SPEAKER_00: I I love this the school school notes coming back to the geology parents.
• 1:14:31
  SPEAKER_00: That's just the best.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's great.
• 1:14:33
  SPEAKER_02: Katie, have you ever watched Gasland?
• 1:14:35
  SPEAKER_03: No, I haven't actually.
• 1:14:37
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, okay.
• 1:14:38
  SPEAKER_02: I would, I mean, I think you back on and we can talk about Gasland.
• 1:14:42
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, is that the um uh Josh Fox, the HBO um if you're gonna documentary kind of thing.
• 1:14:51
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, um, yeah.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_02: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 1:14:53
  SPEAKER_03: That would that would require me to like have HBO.
• 1:14:56
  SPEAKER_03: I'm like a poor millennial, elder millennial.
• 1:14:58
  SPEAKER_02: No, you can no, it's on YouTube.
• 1:15:00
  SPEAKER_02: It's it's like an hour and a half long.
• 1:15:02
  SPEAKER_02: It's on YouTube now.
• 1:15:03
  SPEAKER_02: Um but it that that piece really stirred up a lot of controversy that still is perpetuated today around that surrounds fracking.
• 1:15:13
  SPEAKER_03: Interesting.
• 1:15:14
  SPEAKER_03: Okay, I will watch Gasland and then we can have a V2 following.
• 1:15:18
  SPEAKER_00: There we go.
• 1:15:19
  SPEAKER_00: A V2.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Look forward to it.
• 1:15:20
  SPEAKER_00: This is great.
• 1:15:21
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Katie, thank you so much for taking up an hour plus of your evening to spend with us and explain fracking to us us gobbleheads over here trying to figure it out.
• 1:15:29
  SPEAKER_00: So we really appreciate it.
• 1:15:30
  SPEAKER_00: This has been super great, and um, yeah, look forward to v2.
• 1:15:34
  SPEAKER_00: We appreciate it.
• 1:15:35
  SPEAKER_03: Appreciate the opportunity, guys.
• 1:15:36
  SPEAKER_03: Great to see.
• 1:15:39
  SPEAKER_00: Hey, that's a wrap.
• 1:15:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thanks for listening.
• 1:15:41
  SPEAKER_00: You can follow us on all the social medias and YouTube at Planet Geocast.
• 1:15:44
  SPEAKER_00: Send us an email, planetgeocast at gmail.com, and please download our custom mobile app, Camp Geo.
• 1:15:49
  SPEAKER_00: There you can get visual podcast series and uh a lot of the content that you listen to today with some images.
• 1:15:55
  SPEAKER_00: Cheers.
• 1:15:56
  SPEAKER_00: Peace.