All of them. Remember that when the fluid comes out of the well, there is gas, water and oil in one turbulent, bubbly stream. The separation process is relatively simple and doesn't include any filtering really. It's basically a settling process with some baffling to slow the turbulence. The oil and water in the beginning are quite well mixed from turbulence and so on. Lots of stuff that makes oil black can dissolve in water better than it can dissolve in oil, so produced water is really nasty, caustic stuff and varies from clear to black. Depending on the locale it can even eat through stainless steel sometimes. Oil contamination is not the biggest issue, but due to soaps used for lifting the fluid it may have some dispersion, regardless of the other chemicals often pumped down there specifically to separate the oil and water. A typical oil loss to water might be 0.001% if the process is fine tuned and the separation equipment is appropriately sized, or worse if it's not (which it usually isn't in the beginning).

I work on safety systems to prevent these kinds of accidents. By law these tanks have a berm around them to capture the leaked fluid if they are permanently installed, temporary vessels may not, so I'm guessing this was a temporary vessel like a frac tank (looks like a big shipping container). The plug they're referring to is most likely a 1/2" or 1/4" NPT plug where a level gauge or fluid level controller would be installed. They are usually isolated by valves, which may not have been completely closed, and may not have been noticed by the local FNG before the tank was filled and the leak began. No one would usually congregate in this area to notice, so bringing criminal charges is sort of ridiculous. In the end, we wouldn't be talking about jailing an Exxon CEO, more like your childhood buddy who didn't go to college and tries to make a living working wrenches in the oil field. It seems like a costly, but honest, mistake to me. I know from working in the area that there is definitely no top-down directive to violate EPA laws. There are literally daily meetings where human and environmental safety are stressed as the highest priority, especially at a larger company like XTO. They definitely realize that the public wants to castrate them for any reason it possibly can and make the utmost efforts to prevent these kind of environmental (and PR) disasters.

My stepmother was a programmer in the 80's. She quit and decided to be a homemaker because of rampant sexism in the workplace. Among the things she's told me about that, the one that stands out is that the office would throw incentive parties at strip clubs in order to exclude her from being rewarded for her work. She's a smart lady.. but they would give her the most menial of tasks (mainly testing other programmer's code, and having to very thoroughly document problems or else they would be dismissed as her error).

One would hope that the same things aren't going on today, but from reading /. my guess is that lots of things going on in the workplace make it a male-dominated workforce, least of which would be the capability and interest of smart women in doing the work. Instead, you'll find them in the more gender-neutral fields of medicine, chemistry and biological sciences.

I was shocked and thrilled that in my first industry job our staff programmer is a woman in her late fifties. That gives me hope that maybe it wasn't this bad everywhere. She's brilliant at her work and has a very strong work ethic. I truly didn't expect to see any women in my workplace after my experience in college.

I've flown through most regions of the USA, some 80k miles maybe through too many airports to mention. Been to foreign airports in London Heathrow, Frankfurt, Bucharest, Hong Kong, Singapore and Dubai. All of them seemed pretty similar to TSA style screening, with some having stricter screening practice pre-board and upon departure. For my connecting flights through Frankfurt and Hong Kong, my luggage was searched again, even though I was simply deplaning and re-boarding the same plane. The main difference I've noticed is that the nude-o-scopes are absent, but people are still around to feel me up and rifle through my luggage in most countries. So what's different, from your perspective, in your home country?

You RTFA, and managed to miss that this is unrelated to fracking? I work in the oil and gas industry, so include me among the biased I guess, but I also understand oil and gas production so I'm here to tell you that it is injecting wastewater into fault lines that is causing earthquakes. Not fracking, not oil production, not gas production, but what we call "disposal wells."

In many areas of the USA, water is a scarce commodity, so there aren't any injection wells even though there is lots of fracking.

In many areas of the USA, there is water injection going on in order to "wash out" remaining oil in old formations. These wells are not hydraulically fractured shale formations (the "controversial" process). This has been going on for nearly 100 years.

A Geophysicist I know who works for a large independent oil & gas producer maintains that it has been known for about 20 years that injection wells can cause earthquakes by lubricating fault lines. Extensive testing was done during fracturing at multiple sites and the study was not able to find any data supporting a link between fracking and earthquakes. The instruments used were geophones, which are ultra-sensitive accelerometer devices normally purposed for analyzing formations by echolocation.

All of the comments I see so far clearly didn't click links.. the links mention geothermal production and water injection, the summary indicates that somehow natural gas is extracted by pumping fluid in the ground. That is only true for oil production. In natural gas production our aim is to deliquify wells so that the water isn't exerting backpressure on the gas production, slowing it down and eventually stopping it altogether. Disposal wells are only sometimes used, to get rid of the nasty, brackish, useless water produced from all kinds of hydrocarbon wells.

Respectfully, $600/month is way, way too expensive for most industrial applications. I work in energy, and we use a tunnel to our VPN provided by cellular companies to link our hosting services to customer sites. It's closer to the realm of $40/month depending on the bandwidth of the connection. All of these options, and encryption, are plausible ways to sufficiently separate ones self from the public internet. I won't comment too much on my experiences with unsecured connections except to say that it is much worse than the summary says it is. These are the discovered devices only..

There's really no substitute on the web (for free) that replaces quality scientific periodicals. If I want to know about some uncommon subject, often the only way to get that information is by paying a credible source to deliver it regularly. The news-media and blogosphere aren't particularly interested in detailing the latest way to detect carbon nanotubes of a particular chirality, or the latest low-energy method of measuring gas flow. That's why I'm still an IEEE member, among other organizations.

It's a different market segment, so the trademark can't be enforced in that way in the USA.

A public holiday doesn't count against vacation time in the USA. If you added those days to discriminatory vacation days most people would have 3.5 weeks/year. Is it different in Europe?

Well that, at least, is about to change!

Many states don't have those high speed limits. I live in Oklahoma, and travel all over the states for work. At home speed limits are mostly 65 mph on highways outside of the city. 70 on interstates. 75 on turnpikes in certain parts of the state. In TX, I commonly see 70/75 mph speed limits in the South and West parts of the state. In Louisiana, Arkansas, Pennsylvania, Mississippi.. sometimes just 45, most often not more than 55 mph speed limits. It depends on what the terrain allows. So I would expect lots of people in the NE and select other parts of the country wouldn't know any better, since they haven't been to flyover country where we live. :)

Austin != the rest of Texas.. Their motto is "keep Austin weird" and it's a mix between hipsters, republicans and tech savvy professionals. A very dramatically different place than any other Texas city.

You must not be aware of this, but I was informed when I took first aid training & CPR that because I was a certified first responder, many states require me to ask if the person would like assistance, and comply if they respond affirmatively. If they respond negatively, or cannot respond, then almost every state absolves you of liability. "Good Samaritan" laws typically protect you from legal repercussions if you help and screw up. It's a civil suit, case law issue though - not usually enforced by statute.

It's hard to tell exactly what's on it, but I see a pad with what looks to be four tanks just north of there. It looks like it has a few horizontal and vertical separators too. Major hydrofracturing activity in Oklahoma is centered around other places though.. McAlester, El Reno and Elk City.

The kinds of wells that are known to be quake-causing, according to my geophysicist friend, are water disposal wells. These will have lots of tanks, often 10-20 tanks, for storage buffering. It will also conspicuously have electricity leading to the site to power the injection pumps.

The XY location of the quakes has an uncertainty of 8 miles. The depth was something a little less than a mile uncertainty. So you don't need to look *right* by the given epicenter. I don't think that particular facility could be responsible for releasing several high-magnitude quakes, when compared to what has been causing problems in Arkansas and Texas.

Those ridges may or may not be fault lines.. there is another phenomena that formed those here, the dust bowl. They're all over the place, so I can't say for sure, you'd have to consult the USGS maps. I think there is a fault line through Lincoln County.

Probably Google maps are too outdated to show a recent problem well, in hindsight. I'm curious what kind of operations are in the area, because I've never been there for work, but I have been nearly everywhere in the state where there are major operations going on. Based on the Prague homepage, it looks to be a depleted field, and I wouldn't expect any major hydrofracturing or disposal activity there.

I'm glad you posted this.. but did you read it?

With his arm twisted, Holland would still not definitively tie the microquakes to fracturing at the well. It is fiendishly difficult to attribute earthquakes, given existing scientific uncertainties about why and when quakes are triggered. What is clear is that the quakes are not common: As Holland noted, firms have drilled 100,000 fracturing wells in Oklahoma, with three minor seismic events reported.

The fracturing continued at the Picket well after the earthquakes, and the survey detected no additional seismic activity during that time, Holland said. The well was located in a geologically complex region riven by thrust rocks, he added, and a quake would likely have occurred at some point with or without the drilling -- the rocks were primed for it.

For all of those talking about hydrofracking / drilling / wastewater disposal wells in the same sentence, as if they are the same thing.. they are three completely different processes. First you drill a well. Then the drill rig leaves, and there is a well casing going to the formation. Hydrofracturing equipment moves in and swarms over the wellsite.. but this does not involve a tall drilling rig, as there is no drilling going on. High pressure water and sand are pumped downhole until the well is sufficiently fractured. Then the fracturing equipment leaves. The well makes oil, gas and water. Not always oil.. but usually. The water is useless, so it's trucked off. If there is a whole lot of water, then trucking is expensive, so they drill a wastewater disposal well which pumps the water into a different formation. Sometimes this is on a fault line, and sometimes it lubricates the fault so that earthquakes start happening.

But notice.. the wastewater disposal well is both not on the same site nor in the same formation as the hydrofractured well. If hydrofracturing has any effect at all, it must be due to fracturing on a fault line where there isn't already a lot of fluid accumulated.

FUD. According to a geophysicist buddy, salt-water injection wells have been known to cause earthquakes due to lubrication of fault lines. He doesn't seem to think there's a link to hydrofracturing. I work in the oilfield, I don't think there's a lot of that kind of activity in that area. If you check the satellite maps you can verify that, wells stand out as bright square pads. We would be much more likely to have that happen in the area West of Oklahoma City, where there is LOTS of horizontal drilling and hydrofracturing going on right now, rather than over by Prague, if hydrofracturing actually caused quakes.