Three major earthquakes that rattled Alberta’s Peace River country in 2022 and 2023 had nothing to do “with natural tectonic activity” as initially claimed by the Alberta Energy Regulator and everything to do with the oil and gas industry’s hidden waste problem: toxic water.

A new study led by University of Alberta geophysicists has once again confirmed, as The Tyee originally reported, that “the largest known induced earthquake in Canada” was triggered by injecting large volumes of wastewater produced from bitumen facilities deep into the ground.

The temblor knocked people off their feet and pushed the ground up three centimetres.

An injection well operated by Obsidian Energy, a Calgary-based firm, was the primary trigger of the earthquake cluster “with secondary contributions from multiple distant wells more than 20 km away,” said the study.

Since 2012 Obsidian’s 2000-metre-deep disposal well has injected more than one million cubic metres of salt water into the ground. A record-breaking earthquake occurred on Nov. 20, 2022, near the disposal well after fluids migrated into a nearby fault about 50 kilometres from the town of Peace River.