Drilling Reawakens Sleeping Faults in Texas, Leads to Earthquakes

Wastewater injection is adding energy to the system, in what is probably a very unpredictable way. You're postulating these mini-quakes completely dissipate all of that added energy, and also consume a significant amount of the potential energy that is (largely?) independent of human activity.

Also, economic damages probably don't scale linearly with energy release. Unless structures are specifically built to withstand energy release below a certain threshold (without significant economic damage), and those smaller quakes are also below that threshold, multiple smaller quakes are likely to result in greater economic damages. For example, causing 25% damage to a building 10 times versus 100% 1 time.

/r/science Thread Parent Link - scientificamerican.com