How does geothermal drilling trigger earthquakes?
What are the chances this deep geothermal drilling near The Geysers could set off one of the larger faults, like the San Andreas? Here’s what we know: You can think about The Geysers—the upper three miles (4.8 kilometers) of crust—as a sponge, and the sponge is wet. Now we’re taking fluid out of the sponge, and we’re taking heat out of the sponge. When you dry out a sponge, it contracts. The Geysers is contracting. From the data, we can see it pulling in, which means that it’s changing the stress field around it. Surrounding the field are some active faults, which have the capacity for some larger earthquakes. So one day one of the tectonic faults is going to move. People are going to ask the question: Did the shrinkage of The Geysers cause the movement of the fault? If that’s the case then we have a larger issue. See here. Engineers are even worse at political science than geology. No need at all to wonder if geothermal power will be blamed for earthquakes, drought, famine, disease. I
