Fracking-Induced Earthquakes Are Menacing Argentina as Regulators Stand By – GWC Mag

AÑELO, Argentina—Ana Guircaleo was deep in slumber when a thunderous crash jolted her awake. Guircaleo, 72, barely had time to register that her television was shattered into pieces on the floor when she felt the convulsing of the Earth beneath her bed. She bolted, half naked and terrified, across the threshold of her red brick ranch-style home and into the open desert beneath a dark sky. 

That 2019 earthquake, Guircaleo recounted in a recent interview, was not the first nor the most intense seismic event to hit her small Wirkaleo Mapuche community since hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, for hard-to-reach oil and natural gas began in the early 2010s in Vaca Muerta, a shale and limestone deposit roughly the size of Maryland that is located in Argentina’s northern Patagonia region. 

Since 2018, Wirkaleo and the adjacent small town of Sauzal Bonito have at times endured 48-hour periods of more than a dozen earthquakes ranging from mild tremors to violent shaking that have left many homes with veined cracks in walls, broken windows and crumbled chimneys. Guiracelo said the persistent tremors have aggravated her high blood pressure, caused pervasive mental stress and put her into debt—as a retiree on a small budget, she had to take out a loan to pay for repairs to her home. 

“I have been completely traumatized,” she said.

For Guiracelo and her neighbors, many of whom are Indigenous Mapuche families, little relief is in sight. There is no chance fracking will diminish, or end, any time soon in Argentina, given the nation’s deep reserves of hydrocarbons and its desperate need to meet domestic energy demand and produce exports to power its economy. Indeed, Argentine officials, like their American counterparts, are currently developing facilities to expand unconventional oil and gas production at a breakneck pace, with the ultimate aim of exporting liquified natural gas (LNG). With gas making up about 55 percent of Argentina’s energy consumption, the nation’s increase in domestic gas production in 2023 alone saved it about $2 billion by replacing imports, mostly from neighboring Bolivia. Exporting LNG to Southeast Asian countries moving away from coal and to a world weaning itself off of Russian gas could reverse Argentina’s energy balance, making it a net exporter and bringing in foreign currency needed to pay down tens of billions of dollars of its sovereign debt. 

As he aims to pull the country back from economic crisis, Argentina’s newly elected libertarian president, Javier Milei, has vowed to eliminate the country’s environmental ministry and “unshackle” the energy industry. In recent months, Argentina’s inflation hit triple digits, its poverty rate reached 57 percent and the government narrowly avoided another sovereign debt default. Milei, who has in the past denied human-caused climate change, has introduced legislation aimed at stimulating investment in Vaca Muerta. 

As the energy industry contends that unconventional oil and gas can smooth the world’s transition to low-carbon energy sources while meeting present energy demands, environmentalists point out that the development of Vaca Muerta, home to the world’s second-largest shale gas and fourth-largest shale oil reserves, will produce huge greenhouse gas emissions in contravention of Argentina’s commitments under international climate agreements. 

Beyond governments’ wrangling over climate change, the outsourcing of the environmental and social impacts of oil and gas extraction on local communities remains ever present. While gas and oil have flowed abroad and to population centers like Buenos Aires, locals living in and around the Neuquen basin have been left largely on their own to endure fracking’s impacts. Government officials lack adequate numbers of monitoring stations and data to track seismic activity, dispute the intensity of community-reported earthquakes, and early on had largely ignored decades of science linking fracking and wastewater disposal to earthquakes. Guiracelo and other locals say that in the wake of the first earthquakes, government and various energy company officials told them that the rumbling was natural—about 90 miles west of Sauzal Bonito lay the snow-capped Andes mountain range where two immense tectonic plates collide. A few miles east of the towns are two large man-made lake reservoirs, created in the late 1900s when hydroelectric dams were installed on the Neuquen river. Both geographic features can, in theory, put stress on underground faults, triggering earthquakes.  

But, Guiracelo and other residents were skeptical of officials’ glib explanation. After all, people in her community and Sauzal Bonito had been living in the area for years if not decades, and some families for generations. They had never felt an earthquake before nor was there a record of earthquakes in the vicinity of Sauzal Bonito. 

Some of those residents worked in the oil and gas industry and word spread throughout the communities about the mechanics of fracking—the pumping, then extracting, at high pressure of millions of gallons of water mixed with toxic chemicals, sand and other additives to fracture rock so that hydrocarbons can be extracted. They also learned that fracking companies dispose of some of the hazardous liquid waste that flows back to the surface by reinjecting the fluid at high pressure deep into the Earth. 

If all of those underground hydraulic changes were suddenly happening beneath their homes, surely that had to be contributing to the problem, Guiracelo had thought. She and other rural residents already had low trust in the provincial Neuquen and federal governments. Among other reasons, no one had bothered to tell the people of Sauzal Bonito and Wirkaleo before officials approved fracking operations in the region, let alone consult those communities about it.  

In light of officials’ flat denial that the earthquakes might be man-made, Guiracelo and other residents were left wondering, “Where can we go for some answers?”

Big Risks Shrouded in Secrecy and Denial 

Locals weren’t the only ones who were rattled by the seismic activity hitting Sauzal Bonito and Wirkaleo in 2018. 

News reports about the earthquakes had caught the eye of Javier Grosso, a 39-year-old geographer from the neighboring province of Rio Negro. Grosso, a well-liked and affable professor at the National University of Comahue, knew that unlike Argentina’s mountainous border with Chile, the low desert plateaus around Sauzal Bonito were not prone to seismic activity. When he sketched out a map marking the locations of fracking operations and quakes’ purported epicenters, the drawing produced a cluster of dots over and around the towns of Sauzal Bonito and Wirkaleo. 

His suspicion that the tremors had some relationship to fracking operations was reinforced when he checked the official seismic activity records of international monitors and the Argentine government—they had no records of earthquakes in the area around Wirkaleo and Sauzal Bonito before 2015. 

Over the next year, Grosso often made the two-hour drive to those communities, knocking on doors and gathering information about when and how intensely residents felt tremors. He quickly noticed that what residents were telling him did not track with data that the federal government’s National Institute of Seismic Prevention, known by its acronym INPRES, was releasing. 

To start, between 2015 and 2020, locals told him about far more felt tremors than the 64 earthquakes captured by INPRES. That agency, like the U.S. Geological Survey, maintains a national network of seismological stations to monitor movements in the Earth. Seismograph machines in those stations record motion when underground faults slip, releasing energy that sends vibrations through the Earth. 

Scientists need at least three monitoring stations to roughly locate the epicenter of an earthquake—the nearest station picks up the vibrations the earliest, and the difference in time among different stations can be used to calculate, or triangulate, where the earthquake’s epicenter is located. The more monitoring stations in place, the more accurately scientists can locate the epicenter. 

Knowing the position of an earthquake’s epicenter is important because scientists need that information to best assess what caused the affected fault to slip—and ultimately policymakers can use that information to implement preventative measures if human activity is inducing earthquakes. 

Yet around Sauzal Bonito, historically few seismic monitoring stations existed because the area had no recorded history of earthquakes and had long been considered low risk for seismic activity. As Grosso saw it, the deficiency in monitoring devices meant that the information INPRES had been reporting could be deficient or flawed. 

Then there were the conflicting characterizations between locals and some government officials about the intensity of the earthquakes. While each earthquake has one magnitude, its intensity—what effect the shaking has on people and infrastructure—is relative to how far away the epicenter and hypocenter (the depth of the earthquake) are located. An earthquake that originates deep inside the Earth’s crust, or far away, will be felt less intensely than a earthquake of the same magnitude but that is closer to Earth’s surface. 

INPRES reported that most of the tremors near Sauzal Bonito and Wirkaleo had relatively low magnitudes, with a few exceptions exceeding a magnitude four. Grosso suspected the smaller magnitude earthquakes were both shallow and near the towns because locals recounted terrifying episodes of undulating ground and walls, barking dogs and rock slides, among other effects. And Grosso himself saw the physical damage to infrastructure and rock formations, documenting it by taking photographs on his cellphone. 

Some Neuquen government officials characterized the onset of tremors differently. 

As one provincial legislator put it at the time, the earthquakes around Sauzal Bonito were so minor that they were “one millionth of the smallest earthquakes with enough intensity to do damage.” 

Reactions like that led Grosso to believe that Neuquen officials, who had primary regulatory authority over matters involving natural resources, were either willfully shielding fracking operations from scrutiny, or that those regulators were not understanding the hazards now facing residents throughout the region—almost no infrastructure in the Neuquen basin was built to withstand earthquakes, including the two hydroelectric dams located kilometers away from the afflicted communities. 

“Shale oil and gas production carries a big risk that these dams could be broken by induced seismic activity,” said Argentine seismologist Andres Folguera. “That is a big risk, and it’s not quantifiable, it’s not totally understood.”

Whatever the reasons for officials’ initial denials, Grosso thought there were serious gaps in regulatory oversight and wondered how he could force Neuquen officials to take the problem seriously. He considered that scientifically linking fracking activities to the earthquakes might do that. 

So, he sought out the help of the Argentine engineer Guillermo Tamburini Beliveau, an expert in cartography and geodesy. Starting in 2019, the men set out to gather information that they would ultimately piece together to answer the question Grosso heard repeatedly from locals: Is what our government saying true? 

Dozens of Studies Link Earthquakes and Fracking

Communities like Wirkaleo and Sauzal Bonito endure a disproportionate burden of the impacts from hydrocarbon extraction. Factors like the towns’ remoteness, low socioeconomic status and the comparative power of the energy industry all contribute to the likelihood that the burdens borne by people like Ana Guircaleo are kept largely invisible even when the causes of that harm are well understood.

“The majority of the Argentine population accept the sacrifice zones around oil and gas development because we’re in this social and economic crisis and the narrative is: We have 40 percent poverty so we can’t have the luxury of not exploiting this activity,” said Santiago Bernabé Cané, an Argentine environmental lawyer. 

When residents of Sauzal Bonito reported feeling their first major earthquake in 2018, the energy industry and policymakers had long known that human activities—from oil and gas disposal wells to mining, and geologic carbon sequestration—could induce earthquakes. 

As far back as the 1960s, when the injection of hazardous chemicals into a well at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal near Denver triggered a 4.8 magnitude earthquake, the risks of pumping liquids deep underground have been understood. Pushed into sedimentary rocks at high pressure, fluids can lubricate existing underground faults, causing those faults to slip and trigger earthquakes. 

In the 2000s, when fracking combined with horizontal drilling took off throughout the United States, the increase in the number of earthquakes in fracking regions, many of which were previously low or aseismic areas, correlated with an increase in underground fluid injection and extraction operations. In the central United States, the number of annual earthquakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater ballooned from a historic annual rate of 25 to 1,000 in 2015.

Today, dozens of scientific papers have documented links between induced seismicity and the unconventional oil and gas industry’s waste management practice of reinjecting fracking wastewater into old wells. Later studies confirmed that fracking, in some contexts, can itself induce quakes. 

While there are still many uncertainties about induced earthquakes, known or knowable factors—the natural rates of seismic activity in an area, the permeability of sedimentary rock (which provides a pathway for fluids to reach faults), the relative location of operations to faults and the pressure and amounts of fluid injected—have bearing on whether oil and gas operations are likely to trigger tremors. And so the gathering and sharing of information about the phenomenon is immensely important to understanding and preventing the tremors.

Whether regulators and the industry are willing to put regulations in place requiring the tracking and sharing of that information, or whether they’re willing to take adequate precautionary measures, is a different matter, according to Grosso. 

As earthquakes menaced communities living near fracking operations in Texas, Ohio, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Canada, the Netherlands, Italy and elsewhere, regulators have responded differently to the problem, with some mandating versions of a so-called traffic light system to minimize the risk. Under those rules, companies continuously monitor operations’ seismic impacts. If underground tremors become more pronounced, companies must either slow down pumping or pause operations. 

In Oklahoma, an area not prone to earthquakes, regulators have, at times, ordered pauses or shut down pumping operations based on seismic reports. In doing so, regulators there have brought down incidents of induced quakes of 3.0 magnitude or greater from more than 900 in 2015 to 30 in 2022. 

In the Netherlands, after more than 1,000 quakes affected residents living near the Groningen gas field, the Dutch government shuttered all fracking operations there, leaving valuable gas underground and requiring the consortium of operators, Shell, Exxon and the Dutch government, to compensate homeowners harmed by the quakes. 

A scathing governmental report into the causes and consequences of the Groningen earthquakes found that while the consortium made over $425 billion in profit, thousands of residents were left with property damage, health issues and diminished quality of life. Throughout Groningen, earthquakes are expected to continue for years to come as a result of the changes made to the underground geology. Calling the situation a “disaster in slow motion,” because of the persistent earthquakes, the Dutch report concluded that “not only decision-makers, but the rest of the Netherlands as well as the media, long underestimated the problems in Groningen.” 

Terrorized by Earthquakes

Similarly, families in Wirkaleo and Sauzal Bonito have—for six years—been reporting financial losses, diminished property values and mental health ailments they blame on the uncertainty now woven into their daily lives from not knowing when the next rumbling will occur. Many live in earthquake-damaged homes that may or may not be safe—in Groningen, the Dutch government has been carrying out safety checks on affected infrastructure. In remote Argentine Patagonia it’s unclear if any safety checks have been carried out. In response to a question from Inside Climate News about whether the province had a policy in place for carrying out safety checks on homes and infrastructure, a spokesperson for the Neuquen provincial government said that was “outside the orbit and scope of the Ministry of Energy and Natural Resources.” 

Argentina’s decentralized system of government gives provinces like Neuquen a significant amount of power over the oil and gas industry. Some analysts say that structure has led to oversight of the industry being determined largely by political negotiations between governors and companies, as opposed to through more transparent lawmaking processes. Since late 2018, Neuquen province’s environmental ministry has said it is conducting research for a “Preventive Plan for the Occurrence of Seismic Events,” but has not said when that plan will be released.  

The Neuquen government spokesman said there are no plans to enact new regulations aimed at controlling induced seismicity, but that the province was working on a seismic traffic light plan and early warning system. He did not say when those systems would be implemented. Currently, fracking companies are not required to include seismic risk assessments in their environmental impact studies, the regulatory document used to assess risk and form the basis of licensing decisions.  

Nor are companies required to publicly disclose the seismic monitoring information they track— if they are tracking it at all. At least one company operating adjacent to Sauzal Bonito, Mexico-based Vista Oil & Gas, told the Neuquen government that it does not have a monitoring network for seismic activity, according to a 2024 Neuquen environmental ministry report. 

And so, when Grosso and Tamburini-Beliveau began writing to company and government officials throughout 2019 and 2020 requesting more detailed seismic monitoring information, it did not come as a surprise that their requests went unanswered. 

When the men began showing up at government and company offices, they were turned away empty handed or told the seismic information they sought was covered by confidentiality agreements between fracking companies and the government. This was seemingly in breach of the decades-old commitments Argentina and world governments have made to ensure the public has access to environmental information—a bedrock principle not just of environmental law making but of democratic governance, according to the Argentine environmental law group Fundación Ambiente y Recursos Naturales (FARN), which accused officials of violating the Escazú Agreement, among other national and international laws. Seismologists and academics have also emphasized the importance of information transparency to better understand and manage induced earthquakes. 

“The key to effective regulation and mitigation is transparency. In this regard, scientists can work towards building trusting relationships with industry, and specifically ones that facilitate the sharing of data openly,” wrote Swiss seismologist Ryan Schultz in a 2020 paper on fracking-induced seismic events.

Tamburini-Beliveau, the engineer working with Grosso, was apoplectic about the stonewalling, thinking at the time: “It’s impossible to understand why the government makes confidential agreements with the companies—this is a matter related to our national territory, our soil, our geography and geology.”

The La Calera and Loma Campana Oil and Gas Field

Earlier this year, underneath a bright February sky mirroring the light blue and white colors of the Argentine flag, Grosso, tall and with a mane of salt and pepper hair, leans out of our car’s passenger-side window, assuring an industry security guard that he is on the visitors’ list for the Campo Maripe Mapuche community.

As the guard waves us through, Grosso explains that the land we are entering legally belongs to the province of Neuquen, but that the provincial government, in 2014, officially recognized that the families of Campo Maripe, one of the roughly 20 Indigenous Mapuche communities living around Vaca Muerta, have been living here since at least 1927. 

One of the limited privileges of that modest recognition is that the Campo Maripe community can allow a small number of visitors into what Grosso calls “one of the epicenters of fracking in Vaca Muerta.” And it has become so despite the Campo Maripe community’s opposition to fracking.

Energy companies refer to this area not as Campo Maripe territory, but as the La Calera and Loma Campana oil and gas fields, and so far only about 5 percent of its recoverable reserves have been extracted. That the industry has had its way with the land is apparent in the dozens of fracking wells in various stages of development dotting the landscape. As of April 2024, there are 1,089 wells in Loma Campana, the vast majority of which are for unconventional production. Among the platforms are gas flares and giant plumes of beige dirt churned up by industry vehicles moving to and from operation sites. Everything here, from desert plants to our clothing, is covered by the industry’s gritty dust, which tends to find its way into your mouth and nose.

Our car turns over gravel stones as it climbs past pipelines the circumference of a basketball that stretch far off into the distance. Known as “anacondas” here, the pipes are used to transport water miles from the Neuquen river to well sites where it’s mixed with additives, pressurized and shot underground. 

Investment in expanding oil and gas production in Argentina is rapidly growing, with more than $10 billion pouring into development last year alone, an 18 percent increase from 2022. Vaca Muerta has received the majority of that investment and, now that a new pipeline has been installed to alleviate a production bottleneck, more hydrocarbons are flowing to the eastern part of the country. 

Plans for additional pipelines and export terminals near Buenos Aires will further enhance Vaca Muerta’s development; the energy consultant Rystad Energy estimates that the shale deposit will see up to 400 new wells installed each year by 2030. Expectations are that Argentina will in the coming years begin, or increase, exports via pipelines to Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and via LNG shipping to the rest of the world. 

In a sense, the mechanics of the operations are a feat of human ingenuity. But many homes in the region lack access to clean water and piped gas for heating and cooking, and bear the brunt of the environmental impacts, making the industry’s lustrous achievements seem as shrouded in problems as the landscape here is in dust. 

Grosso points to a well site that is actively fracking. Clustered around the well are more than a dozen semi trucks helping to pump a slurry of chemicals, sand and water underground. He explains that fluid injection and extraction rates are part of the data that he and Tamburini-Beliveau used for the study they published in the scientific journal Nature in November 2022 that established a link between fracking operations and the induced earthquakes in Vaca Muerta. 

For that study, they also used satellite radar interferometry (InSAR) data to examine land deformation in the region over time, which gave them insight into what “background” local tectonic and ground dynamics have been happening in the area so they could better assess what role fracking was playing in the seismic uptick. 

Based on their analysis, which included modeling because of the lack of seismic data in the region, Grosso and Tamburini-Beliveau concluded that there was a “clearly shown” correlation between the earthquakes, fracking operations and ground deformation that “suggest a direct relationship between hydrocarbon production and seismicity.” 

One graph included in the study looks like the infamous climate change hockey stick graph: water injection and extraction rates are flat until about January 2017, when they lurch up and to the right through the year 2020, corresponding with an expansion in fracking operations and seismic energy in the region. During a temporary moratorium on operations in 2020 due to the Covid-19 pandemic, earthquakes in the region dropped to zero. 

Independent seismologists, one of whom worked as an industry consultant, reviewed the study at my request and affirmed its findings. However, they noted, as did Grosso and Tamburini-Beliveau, that one of the limitations of the study was that the data available from seismic monitoring stations was incomplete because there was, and still are, an inadequate number of seismic monitors installed in the affected region. While 10 new INPRES stations have been added in Neuquen since fracking operations began in the early 2010s, the number is still low compared to places like Oklahoma, which has 93 stations across the state maintained by the state’s geological survey; within the Netherlands, which is about one-fourth larger than Vaca Muerta, the Groningen area alone has 70 stations. A spokesperson for the Neuquen government said six more public monitoring stations are being installed in the province but are not yet operational. The spokesperson also said the data being gathered from companies’ private monitoring stations is not made public. 

Tamburini-Beliveau and Grosso’s research is part of a body of work from scientists, activists and lawyers that has pushed the Neuquen government to increase transparency around what officials and companies know about fracking operations’ links to induced seismic events. Their work also helped force officials to acknowledge that fracking operations are very likely driving the hundreds of earthquakes that have happened in and around Vaca Muerta since 2018. Progress beyond that acknowledgement has been slow, with some locals and researchers attributing the pace to economic factors. 

“The government always favors the conditions for exploitation,” Folguera, the seismologist, said, pointing to a rollback of environmental regulations in the 1990s, during another financial crisis, to drive investment into the mining industry. “I’m not against mining or oil and gas, but the state has to study environmental impacts and regulate.”

After their 2022 Nature study published, Tamburini-Beliveau and Grosso have continued cross-checking INPRES data with other sources, including monitoring stations in Chile that pick up the more intense quakes happening in Vaca Muerta. 

They’ve found that often the INPRES data doesn’t match what the Geoscientific Network of Chile has found. And, because the Chileans, like the U.S. Geological Survey, disclose the formulas they use to calculate epicenter coordinates, Beilveau and Grosso are able to check on the reliability of those formulas and have found them credible. INPRES does not publicly disclose the formulas it uses and does not publicize data on earthquakes registering below magnitude 2.5.

“Those formulas and the seismic data that we know some companies are tracking is crucial to understanding the risk of fracking operations, inducing earthquakes,” Tamburini-Beliveau said during a recent interview. “We know the information is actively being hidden and they don’t want us to have it.”

“I’m not against mining or oil and gas, but the state has to study environmental impacts and regulate.”

In Loma Campana, Grosso leads me to a different well site, one that is in the beginning stage of being drilled. On average, 1.1 of these sites are installed monthly in the Neuquen basin. This well belongs to Argentina’s national oil company, YPF, and Grosso rattles off the names of some other companies with operations in Vaca Muerta: Chevron, Exxon, Shell, Tecpetrol and Vista Oil and Gas. He says that between the companies, they have installed at least 22 private seismographs and some use the publicly funded Fernando Volponi Geophysical Institute at the National University of San Juan to process the information the monitors gather. That data is part of what Grosso and Beilveau have been trying to get a hold of—and believe residents are entitled to not least because it’s being subsidized by public funding. 

“We’ve tried to get it, but the state looks the other way,” Grosso says, shaking his head. 

Staying in Their Homes

Last year, some of the residents of Sauzal Bonito and the Wirkaleo Mapuche community filed a lawsuit against the Neuquen government, seeking to force officials to carry out environmental impact studies that include an evaluation of induced seismicity and its risks for existing infrastructure and underground aquifers. Until such a study is completed, the plaintiffs asked Argentina’s Supreme Court of Justice to order a moratorium on all operations in Vaca Muerta.  

Their complaint, prepared by the Buenos Aires-based legal aid group FARN, notes that in the first two weeks of September of 2023, there were 14 earthquakes in the Vaca Muerta area—one of which hit Sauzal Bonito with tremors of magnitude four on the Richter scale. FARN has also asked the court to order INPRES and Neuquen officials to release the seismology data Grosso and Tamburini-Beliveau have been after. 

While the case remains pending, Grosso has continued his visits to Sauzal Bonito and Wirkaleo. In February, he met with Noemi and Carlos Painevil, two plaintiffs in the litigation, who have lived in Sauzal Bonito for about 20 years. Their home is tucked into the center of the one-street town and Noemi operates a small grocery store that’s attached to her living room. 

A former secretary with an entrepreneurial spirit who smiles widely and often, Noemi painted the home’s interior bright shades of orange, lime green and purple. Today, those walls are veined with cracks that began in 2018 and have continued to grow with successive tremors. 

“First came the sounds of the Earth cracking,” Carlos explained, sitting at the couple’s dining room table where the sweet bread Noemi prepared sits next to the couple’s shared steaming cup of maté. “Then it felt like there was a monster under the Earth, shaking it.”

He makes claws with his hands and thrusts them back and forth in the air. 

The couple has gone to bed nearly every evening for the past five years wondering if an earthquake will hit in the middle of the night. A few times, they have been right to worry, and Noemi describes the feeling of awakening to tremors as “cold going through her spine.” 

Still, they have refused the Neuquen government’s offer to provide them with an anti-seismic home. They aren’t alone. Some families told me that the anti-seismic structures are a fraction of the size of their existing homes. Others view government provided homes as made from inferior material (wood) as compared to the brick homes they currently have. Those families, including some of Guircaleo’s relatives, said they want the government or fracking companies to repair or rebuild their existing homes in a way that is substantially similar to what they have now. One family told me that they tried to negotiate with Tecpetrol, but that company officials told them they couldn’t afford to pay for a replacement home. Tecpetrol did not respond to requests for comment. In response to a question from Inside Climate News about whether the Neuquen government offers affected residents the option to be reimbursed for property damage caused by induced seismic events, the province’s spokesperson said “I don’t know.”

Mabel Panero, one of the Painevils’ neighbors, did accept one of the government-provided homes, but said she did so only after officials told her that she would need to sign a legal waiver if she opted to remain in her earthquake-damaged home. Panero said she feels safe in the new dwelling but regrets how small it is. When she takes me across the street to what remains of her old cement-block home, her eyes water as she stands in her former dining room, remembering the memories made there. 

For the Painevils, accepting one of the government’s offered homes feels tantamount to taking a payoff in exchange for their silence about the impacts of fracking operations. Beyond earthquakes, fracking-related drinking water issues have plagued Sauzal Bonito, and nearly everyone has a five-gallon water jug dispenser in their dining room. “We have to fight for things that you shouldn’t have to fight for,” Noemi says, rubbing the silver chain around her neck with her thumb and pointer finger.  

She glances down at the pendant at the center, which holds an image of Saint Benito, known as the saint of the impossible. “After big earthquakes, the first thing I do is pray to Saint Benito and the angels,” she said. “Then I call Javier.” 

Exxon, Chevron and Shell: No Data on Earthquakes

Earlier this year, Neuquen’s environmental ministry released some preliminary findings that will be considered as part of its forthcoming “Preventive Plan for the Occurrence of Seismic Events.” The preliminary report features Grosso and Beilveau’s research as well as responses from oil and gas companies operating in Vaca Muerta. It is the first time some of the companies have publicly disclosed information about how they are monitoring seismic activity and taking steps, or not, to prevent it. 

According to the preliminary report, several of the companies, including Chevron, told regulators that to adequately assess fracking operations’ relationship with induced seismic activity, it’s necessary to establish a baseline of natural seismic activity. Chevron began operations in Vaca Muerta in 2013. The company did not respond to questions about whether it carried out a background seismicity assessment at the time, or whether the company asked the government to do so.

Shell’s Argentine subsidiary told regulators that it does not have records of earthquakes in the areas where it is operating in Vaca Muerta because it doesn’t own a network or contract seismographs that generate data on seismic activity potentially induced by fracking operations. Shell was a member of the consortium, also including Exxon, that operated in the Netherlands where fracking operations were linked to over 1,000 induced earthquakes in the Groningen area. Shell said it was now in the process of working with INPRES and others to “quickly develop a network of seismographs that provides us with information on monitoring,” according to the Neuquen environmental ministry’s report. Shell did not respond to a request from Inside Climate News for comment.

Buenos Aires-based Tecpetrol, which operates in the vicinity of Wirkaleo and Sauzal Bonito, told Neuquen regulators that “not having historical data (prior to the start of the activity – year 2010), limits any analysis” regarding fracking induced seismic activity. The company explicitly denied that any of the 2020 earthquakes were related to its operations. 

A spokesperson for Tecpetrol responded to Inside Climate News’ request for an interview, saying that “the appropriate team internally has received your request and will respond directly to you if there is interest in commenting.”

YPF, Argentina’s state-run energy company and the largest operator in Vaca Muerta, told Neuquen officials that its working with the National University of San Juan to assess seismographic data—the same data Grosso and Tamburini-Beliveau have been seeking—but that the data isn’t available yet. The company also said it’s installing 12 new seismic monitoring stations in the Neuquen basin in the areas where it has unconventional operations. It’s unclear whether the data gathered from those stations will be publicly available. YPF did not respond to a request for comment.

ExxonMobil said it did not have a record of earthquakes where it operates in Vaca Muerta and that it has been making available its “international experience” obtained by the company in the United States and Canada, according to the Neuquen governmental report. The report did not indicate whether Exxon mentioned its experience in Groningen in the Netherlands. Earlier this year, Exxon announced that it was considering a $1 billion sale of its assets in Vaca Muerta. Exxon told Inside Climate News in a written statement that the company was “committed to developing a better understanding of the factors leading to seismic activity, including natural seismicity” and that it shares its “technical knowledge with regulatory agencies and academia.”