Well it appears that common sense hasn't prevailed in Oklahoma and Kansas. Below is map of the principal shale oil and gas plays in the US. The Oklahoma and Kansas oil and gas plays (Woodford formations), where the seismic activity is occurring, are the relatively small areas shown on the map below above the Barnett Shale formation in Texas. Well I'm no expert and the natural water levels in the Woodford formations might not be representative of the other shale oil/gas producing areas in the US but I've just looked at the intensity of oil and gas permits and the number of wells spudded in the last 90 days in Kansas and it is staggering in its scale. Below is a YouTube Video I've made of my interactive search at the Kansas geological survey looking at the wells and permits (if you double click on the video it should play on full screen on your computer). The shale oil/gas industry in the US better hope that this isn't an emerging endemic problem across all formations. I personally know that even some of carbon sequestration models that have been used to help allow the environmental permitting of the decabillion dollar off-shore gas projects in Western Australia are inherently deficient in being able to predict the accurate containment and migration of this gas over time. Some of these new technological developments in oil and gas have just not been tried and tested over long enough time scales.
Eshmun
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