By Tom Kenworthy

Scientists from two Texas universities are looking into a pair of recent earthquakes near the Texas-Louisiana border for clues to whether they were related to underground injection of oil and gas drilling waste produced in the course of hydraulic fracturing or fracking.

One of the scientists studying the two recent Texas quakes was on a team that concluded a swarm of earthquakes near Dallas in 2008 and 2009 were related to the disposal of drilling wastes, according to E&E’s Energy Wire.

Cliff Frohlich, a research scientist at the University of Texas who studied those Dallas area quakes, did not rule out a similar conclusion in the recent east Texas quakes.

“It’s possible they were natural,” he said. “It’s possible they were man-made.”

The two quakes, a 3.9 magnitude event on May 10 and a 4.3 magnitude one on May 17, took place northeast of Nacogdoches, Texas. That area is part of the Haynesville shale formation and is home to injection wells.

The two recent events come about a month after the US. Geological Survey reported that a big increase in earthquakes across a large part of the nation’s midsection since 2001 is “almost certainly manmade.”  Though ...

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