Ohio has become a state of easy virtue for readily allowing “fracking waste” – the hazardous byproducts of the high-pressure slurries injected to extract oil and natural gas from shale far below Earth’s surface – to be pumped so compliantly into Ohio land. Much of the waste now being disposed of in Ohio’s deep-injection wells doesn’t even originate in the state. Yet it has the potential to cause earthquakes or — of far greater concern — to migrate into Ohioans’ drinking water.
Ohio has become a state of easy virtue for readily allowing “fracking waste” – the hazardous byproducts of the high-pressure slurries injected to extract oil and natural gas from shale far below Earth’s surface – to be pumped so compliantly into Ohio land. Much of the waste now being disposed of in Ohio’s deep-injection wells doesn’t even originate in the state. Yet it has the potential to cause earthquakes or — of far greater concern — to migrate into Ohioans’ drinking water.
Ohio has become a prime regional repository of fracking waste originating throughout local oil-shale country, which includes eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and parts of West Virginia.
Part of the reason, no question, is eastern and southeast Ohio’s waste-disposal-friendly geology. As cleveland.com’s Peter Krouse recently reported, Ohio has become regional Dumpster No. 1 for fracking’s many hazardous-waste byproducts from throughout the resource-rich Marcellus and Utica shale regions of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.
Yet, outrageously, this is happening without a requirement in Ohio to reveal what those toxins are — and via a permitting system that seems geared to oblige oil and gas interests above the right of Ohioans to be protected from toxic spills, underground waste migration or earthquakes caused by the high-pressure injection of so much waste into the bedrock.
This laissez-faire attitude traces to a feckless General Assembly that seems determined to be at the beck and call of a relentless gas-and-oil lobby. The lobby enjoys a Statehouse edge because fracking can be a source of jobs in impoverished Appalachian Ohio, despite the region’s scars from earlier extractive undertakings, such as strip-mining for coal.
This is also why Ohio’s government has gone all-in for fracking the lands under state parks, as required by a 2022 law administered by the five-member state Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, chaired by the state Natural Resources director, an appointee of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Little surprise, Ohio’s fracking-friendly legislators require that two of the four other Land Management commissioners must be “recommended by a statewide organization representing the oil and gas industry.”
This editorial was originally published at cleveland.com. You can read the full article here.