A highly contentious meeting where personal insults were hurled resulted in a huge win for the fracking industry in Ohio – and an upsetting loss for park and wildlife advocates.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Management Commission voted June 29 to approve 22 fracking bids, opening up 12,963 acres of land at Egypt Valley wildlife area, 1,483 acres at Jockey Hollow wildlife area and an additional 513 acres under Salt Fork State Park for such use.
In total, 29 nominations and bids were considered, the most ever in one meeting for the commission. Once a bid is approved, the bidder retains mineral rights but must go through the Ohio Department of Natural Resources Division of Gas and Resource Management before drilling can begin.
Four nominations to frack a total of 8,366 acres of Egypt Valley were denied by the commission because almost the exact same parcels were already approved by the commission earlier this year.
Protesters push back against fracking requests
Prior to the meeting at the Ohio Department of Public Safety, nonprofit Save Ohio Parks held a press conference during which advocates voiced their opposition to the fracking bids. The protesters stuck around during the meeting.
“No more gas, no more oil,” they chanted during the meeting. “Keep the carbon in the soil.”
They also called the commissioners “bootlickers,” “sellouts,” “shameful” and “disgusting.”
In a statement released after the meeting, Melinda Zemper, a spokesperson for the pro-parks group, said the commission “continues to operate as a mindless cog in the machine of energy corruption in Ohio.”
“Voters need to contact lawmakers now and press them to expand and deploy cheaper, reliable and low emissions renewable energies like wind and solar,” Zemper said in the statement. “It’s no secret that gas fracked from Ohio state parks and public lands will likely go to power AI data centers. And if Ohio’s longstanding fossil-fuel dominant energy policy continues, we’ll all pay more for energy while our health is compromised and our clean air, fresh drinking water, and farmland are contaminated.”
Theresa White, chair of the Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, was not available for comment after the meeting concluded.
But Mike Chadsey, director of external affairs at the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said people don’t focus on enough on the “energy balance sheet.”
“They’re only looking at the negatives and not the positives,” Chadsey told the Dispatch. “They don’t talk about the jobs and the investments and the economies in southeast Ohio that have been rebounding because of these investments in these jobs.”
The entire energy balance sheet of natural gas, coal, oil, wind and solar produces many benefits for the state, Chadsey said.
“We’re going to do what we’re going to do in our part of the process, which is bring crude oil natural gas to the surface and ship it, refine it and put it to use to run our economy,” Chadsey said.
Fracking under public land legal in Ohio, state receives royalties
The fracking process uses pressurized water, sand and chemical additives to extract oil and gas reserves from mineral supplies under the Earth’s surface.
In 2022, House Bill 507 allowed oil and gas companies to drill under state lands and parks. Republican-sponsored Senate Bill 219 was signed into law June 24 of this year, cutting into fracking regulations and speeding up the nomination and bid process.
Every lease agreement for a successful bidder includes a 12.5% royalty paid to the state based on the production of oil and gas at that site, with another financial incentive paid by the winning bidder to the state, said Andy Chow, spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. Incentives and royalties paid to the state go to the agency that leases the mineral rights.
The lease bonus for this round of nominations for Ohio Department of Natural Resources properties selected by the commission is more than $241 million, Chow said.
This story has been updated to include new information.
Dispatch Reporter Nora Igelnik can be reached at nigelnik@dispatch.com.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Fracking bids approved for nearly 15,000 acres of public land in Ohio
Reporting by Nora Igelnik, Columbus Dispatch / The Columbus Dispatch
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By Nora Igelnik, Columbus Dispatch | USA TODAY Network
