It’s in the same area as some of the previous quakes in Oklahoma.
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Sharon Wilson is considered a leading citizen expert on the impacts of shale oil and gas extraction. She is the go-to person whether it’s top EPA officials from D.C., national and international news networks, or residents facing the shock of eminent domain and the devastating environmental effects of natural gas development in their backyards.
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Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s well browser web site has a very noticeable deficiency: the lack of any latitude and longitude information for the wells. It makes it more difficult to analyze the proximate cause of an earthquake. Was it natural or was it an “induced” earthquake, i.e. caused by the actions of man?
It’s somewhat harder to tell when one can’t readily obtain the locations of the wells nearby, which is in my humble opinion the main reason why the latitude and longitude is left off of the well browser’s results. Why allow the citizenry any ability to discern for themselves whether or not “natural gas production” activities might be causing earthquakes, as we all know that “big brother” knows best and only has the public’s welfare in mind when it denies them the information they might need to help them make up their own minds?
Pity those of us with thirty years of IT experience, both in software and database, coupled with a Bachelor’s degree in a scientific discipline and having years of geographical information systems (GIS) experience that would allow us to do our own mapping of well sites and earthquakes. In Big Brother’s mind, we’re just too stupid to try and figure out the results for ourselves, and we need to have Big Brother stop us from hurting our tiny little brains by attempting to do so.
Yeah, OK doesn’t seem to value transparency. Even Texas–EVEN TEXAS–has a GIS map.
Lat/long of every well in the country is public source information..Not sure why you can’t find it? As long as the OCC has the correct API, the lat/long is easily found through many sources either by map or table. Try http://www.pangaeadata.com/
I do not believe you have uncovered a conspiracy on this one.
Never said it was a conspiracy, more like obsfucation/impedimentation.
Speaking of which, did you purposely fail to disclose the pricing structure of the subscription to Pangaea Data’s information or its limitations on the storage of data downloaded for analysis? I especially like the clause about new subscribers can start at $125/month, but anyone that’s ever canceled and resubscribed can do so for $250/month.
Perhaps of special note might be that the OCC’s previous version of the well browser apparently did have the lat/long information as evidenced by the screen shots within their end user documentation for the previous edition. An even more amusing side note is that the new version came online, sans lat/long information, just after the Gavin County earthquakes alarmed some of the good citizens of Oklahoma.
Conspiracy? No. Obfuscation/impedimentation? Sure seems like it to me. I’m a computer programmer and have done hundreds of desktop, online, and mobile applications. Adding/removing two fields from an online report is child’s play.
Oh heck, I failed to note that Pangaea Data’s subscription requires payment of the initial subscription of $125/month six months in advance. So let’s see, that’s 6 x 125, gee only $750 initially and $125/month each month thereafter. Perhaps I got it wrong, but I did read the subscription terms twice.
Last reply for the moment. I’ve been slowly building up a blog about the accessibility of fracking and earthquake data at http://thefrackingwall.com. I’ve only posted about Oklahoma Corporation Commission’s site so far, but I’ve pulled down Missouri’s and Ohio’s well data and will post on them next when I’ve geolocated (by city and county) those states respective earthquakes. It’s slow, it’s painful, but I am making progress.
Oops, I lied, this’ll be the last reply for a while.
The Eolas Field earthquakes were in Garvin County, Oklahoma, not Gavin County as I previously replied.
My bad.