Geauga says it's ready when it comes..

EGL founders Mark Dolezal, Tom Henry and Curt Huffman

By Dan Shingler
4:30 am, July 19, 2013

Geauga County has not yet become a hot spot for shale drilling — but if it does, more than 500 landowners there are ready for it. They've all joined forces with a nonprofit known as the Eastern Geauga Landowners, which hopes to attract drillers by offering them ready-to-use tracts of land that are large enough to accommodate a shale gas well — normally about 640 acres. At the same time, the group hopes to protect and benefit its members by providing them a vehicle by which to share information on drilling activity, exploratory activities and, perhaps most importantly, offers made to lease mineral rights in the area.“More information is good for everybody,” reasons Mark Dolezal, one of the group's founders.

Mr. Dolezal, along with fellow property owners Curt Huffman and Tom Henry, founded Eastern Geauga Landowners in 2011. In 2012, the group was incorporated as a nonprofit.

The group's mission is to gather and share information, while also educating other area landowners about shale gas drilling and the demand and prices for mineral rights. While fracking is a contentious issue in the western part of the county, where “No Fracking” signs outnumber “Frack On” signs by a wide margin, the more rural eastern part of the county seems to support drilling. Since Eastern Geauga Landowners was formed, more than 500 landowners from three counties have joined; they boast a combined total of more than 40,000 acres in eastern Geauga, Ashtabula and Trumbull counties.

Eastern Geauga Landowners doesn't negotiate leases, provide legal services or otherwise take a cut from member's bonus or royalty payments. Instead, members simply pay $60 to join and then receive access to information shared within the group.

They also get what the group hopes will be additional bargaining power and higher prices by working in numbers, Mr. Dolezal said. And why not — it's cheaper for a driller to work directly with a large group of landowners than to send landmen across the county to gather them individually.

The group's members also get some marketing help. Member-owned land is displayed on maps at the group's Middlefield headquarters, allowing drillers or other interested parties to quickly get a picture of where and how much acreage is available.

Business, at least on the membership side, is brisk. New landowners show up every week, the three men say. As they spoke on a recent Saturday, a local Amish farmer came in and signed up as a member, putting his 100-acre farm among those listed as available to interested drillers.

So far, there have been no takers though, even as landowner groups to the south have been able to sign lucrative deals to lease their mineral rights. Indeed, Eastern Geauga Landowners concedes it hasn't yet received even an offer to lease its members' acreage.

The group is not worried, though, say its founders. Shale plays take time to develop, and their landowners are not desperate to sign deals right away. The thumper trucks continue to vibrate much of Geauga County in a continual evaluation of its geology and the pipelines that will be needed to carry away gas and oil aren't even built yet. It's better to get the right deal later than a bad deal today, they preach. Besides, they say, he who signs last often laughs loudest in the shale gas and oil business.

“The people in North Dakota who got $25,000 an acre (in the

Bakken shale play) were not the first people to sign leases,” Mr. Henry said.

Shale drilling will continue in Ohio, said Mr. Dolezal, adding that he's confident it will come to Geauga County as well.

“I'm not at all concerned,” he said recently about the prospect that the Utica might fizzle, or might not reach his area. “It will come, and we're not in any hurry.”

If and when it does come, drillers might be glad that the group formed. In some cases, Eastern Geauga Landowners members have enough land to offer entire townships for which drillers can lease mineral rights.

“We're hoping we can do at least one driller per township,” Mr. Henry said.

A balanced approach from Andrew Thomas

Last week we hosted in our offices at Cleveland State University a shale fact-finding contingent from Ukraine, which was investigating the development of shale in Ohio. My colleague in the Energy Policy Center at CSU, Iryna Lendel, had just returned from a lengthy shale research assignment in Ukraine, and had warned me to expect hostility from this group toward hydraulic fracturing. She was right.

Even though our presentation was supposed to be about the economics of shale development, we kept coming back to the environmental risks, and there were plenty of animated discussions.

The Ukrainians understand the fundamental issue: balancing environmental risk against economic value. They also understand that it is not enough to simply dismiss fracking as too dangerous without considering what the risks are for alternatives to meet our energy requirements.

Studying Ohio makes sense in making this assessment: both regions are dependent upon cheap natural gas to fuel their economies. Both regions have had heretofore a small oil and gas industry, and are not able to immediately ramp up a large upstream service sector. And both regions are densely populated, making environmental problems more troubling.

Yet, despite these similarities, Ukrainians seem to have reached a different conclusion in balancing these issues. The shale industry there is struggling to take off, despite an economy that continues to be threatened by the whims of Russian oil and gas giant Gazprom. But in Ohio, it is off and running, with billions of dollars being invested in upstream and midstream oil and gas activities, notwithstanding some nagging environmental concerns. Local benefits result in local support
So why doesn't shale development enjoy the same public support in Ukraine that it does in Ohio?

There are rumors that Gazprom is fomenting distrust among the population with a well-funded anti-fracking campaign. But there is actually a simpler, less devious explanation for this ambivalence: there is no private ownership of mineral rights in the Ukraine. In Ohio, mineral rights are owned privately.

It turns out that in the court of public opinion, for the balancing test to work in favor of development, the economic value derived has to have significant local impact. That is because the inconvenience and environmental risk borne are local.

In Ohio, local support is generated first and foremost by landowners. The balancing test analysis is pretty straightforward for them: they receive generous lease bonus and royalty payments from the developers, and they can and do put into their leases more environmental protections than are provided by Ohio regulatory law.

But this mineral ownership scenario is unique to the United States and Canada. In the rest of the world, the sovereign owns all oil and gas development rights, including those that lie below privately owned lands. This policy, on first blush, makes a great deal of sense. When we purchase land in the United States, we don't expect to acquire the airspace thousands of feet above us. Why should we own the minerals thousands of feet below us?

The problem with sovereign ownership, however, is that it does not work in places where a local balancing test is required. Simply, without a local ownership interest in the minerals, there is no incentive for the people who live in the development areas to support the development. They incur all the inconvenience, but get none of the value. This problem has caused some nations, such as Nigeria, to endure massive civil unrest in and around oil and gas production.

To be sure, the locals do benefit under this system. Locals, after all, have a strong interest in a well-funded government with low taxes. But this benefit is so far removed from them that they can't see it. And try explaining to someone who has to watch a gas well flaring in his backyard why everyone else is entitled to the same benefit he receives from that well.

In the Ukraine, this presents an especially difficult problem: the public has little trust in its government. As with other former Soviet nations, there is risk of public corruption and no sense among the locals who suffer the inconvenience that they will ever see any value whatsoever derived from the development. Post-Chernobyl Ukraine will need to see a clear economic value proposition before it buys into shale development.
Jobs are key
So what does this all mean for us here in Ohio? For one thing, it reaffirms the value of the American system for mineral development. Private ownership may seem unfair to those of us who are left out of the boom, but in fact this is the system that has enabled America to be the leader in oil and gas development for the past 100 years, despite steadily depleting reserves. The severance tax appears to be the best way to ensure the public receives some direct value from oil and gas development.

But more importantly, it also brings into focus what the oil industry needs to do if it wants to continue to be on the winning end of the “balancing test”: employ locals, and lots of them.

Landowners are the big local winners in the shale boom. They will continue to support the industry so long as there develops no pattern of environmental abuse. But they comprise a small minority of the folks directly affected by shale development.

There remains a great deal of work to do to establish the benefit to local communities who share much of the inconvenience and environmental risk with the landowners, but not the royalty and bonus windfalls.

Good morning,

I hope you will post these two documents to the blog for me. They relate directly to hydrofracturing waste and the chemicals that are being or may be introduced into our neighborhoods via the well sites or via injection wells.
We have given these documents to Rep. Patterson and will be presenting them to the Commissioners of Ashtabula County on July 17th.

Thank you,
Gail

A firm believer in the public's right to know.

For Immediate Release, June 26, 2013

 

For Additional Information, Contact

Teresa Mills: Center for Health, Environment and Justice, (614)-507-5651

Jed Thorpe: Ohio Sierra Club, (614) 461-0734

Jack Shaner: Ohio Environmental Council, (614)-487-7506

Melissa English: Ohio Citizen Action, (513) 221-2100

Nathan Johnson:  Buckeye Forest Council, (614)-487-9290

 

U.S. EPA Confirms that Ohio Statute Favoring

The Fracking Industry Violates Federal Safety Laws

 

Ohio’s Legislature Allowed the Oil & Gas Lobby to Dodge the

Federal “Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know” Law

 

Columbus, OH:  In a letter received May 31, the U.S. EPA Office in Chicago confirmed the claims of Ohio environmental leaders that a state statute adopted in 2001 favoring the oil and gas industry violates federal laws designed to protect communities facing chemical emergencies. 

 

            The letter responded to a petition filed in March by community activist Teresa Mills of Grove City that urged the Agency to take enforcement action against oil and gas drillers that violate the federal safety requirements.  The U.S. EPA not only agreed that the Ohio legislature’s sweetheart exemption for oil and gas violates federal law but also confirmed that an investigation is underway on an emergency caused by an oil driller in St. Marys, Ohio, in January, where the federally required safety information had been withheld from local emergency responders.

 

            The federal law involved is the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act (“EPCRA”) which was adopted by Congress in 1986 in response to the chemical disaster in Bhopal, India.  EPCRA requires that local emergency responders have notice of toxic chemicals stored at industrial sites so they can plan in advance how emergencies involving those chemicals would be handled.  EPCRA required industries to report this detailed information to “local emergency planning committees” (“LEPCs”) established in every Ohio county and also to local fire departments. This information would also be assessable by local communities through their local LEPC.

 

            In 2001, the oil and gas industry got around these safety requirements through a new statute, Ohio Revised Code (“ORC”) Section 3750.081, provides that these companies need no longer report the chemicals they have on site to the LEPCs.  This statute says that the standard annual filing of a report on the production of oil and gas from a well site with the Oil & Gas Division of the state Department of Natural Resources satisfies all the required EPCRA safeguards in Ohio instead.  This “production report” however contains no information whatsoever on the toxic chemicals that first responders may face at a drilling site emergency thus confronting communities and emergency responders with the precise kind of risk that EPCRA was designed to prevent. 

 

Because of this corporate carve-out, when emergency teams responded to complaints of concentrated chemical odors at the St. Mary’s oil well, there was no information on file with the LEPC on the toxins there, see story at http://www.dailystandard.com/archive/story_single.php?rec_id=20053.  Follow-up research by Ms. Mills confirmed that no significant information on chemicals at oil and gas sites had been filed anywhere in Ohio and that the St. Mary’s situation would therefore be the norm, not the exception.  In light of the vast amounts of toxic chemicals involved in the new fracking process exploding across Ohio, the dangers to citizens and first responders created by this exemption are becoming increasingly widespread and dramatically more serious.

 

            In agreeing with environmentalists that this set-up is defective, U. S. EPA concluded that the obligation of oil and gas companies to file the detailed federal chemical reporting forms with the LEPC’s “is not affected by the language of ORC 3750.081.”  In other words, the Ohio legislature’s give-away to the oil and gas lobbies “does not supersede the requirements of EPCRA.”  The U.S. EPA letter is in accord with Ms. Mill’s contention that any oil and gas driller that does not file the required forms with their local LEPC is subject to prosecution for violating federal law.  U.S. EPA’s investigation into the St. Mary’s incident confirms this principle.

 

            “Fracking is more than hazardous enough with the enormous amounts of chemicals involved and an ODNR staff with few resources and a far greater commitment to industry convenience than community safety,” Ms. Mills said.  “But removing frackers wholesale from the nation’s basic safeguards against chemical emergencies is beyond the pale.  This is the kind of abject corporate favoritism that causes many Ohioans to regard the Ohio legislature with such scorn.”

 

"There's nothing special or magical about the chemicals used in fracking that should make them exempt from right-to-know laws," said Jed Thorp, Manager of the Ohio Sierra Club. "If reporting your chemicals is good enough for every other industry in Ohio, it certainly should be good enough for an industry with a track record of accidental releases like the fracking industry."

"First responders and the public have an urgent right to know what chemicals may be stored or released in their community. Public safety should always trump corporate convenience. That's the law of the United States. It also needs to be the law of Ohio” states Jack Shaner, Deputy Director, Ohio Environmental Council.

“This determination by US EPA confirms that the oil and gas industry must follow the same rules as other chemical-intensive industries in Ohio,” states Melissa English, Development Director of Ohio Citizen Action. “We look forward to the day when this critical flow of information begins again between the industry and emergency planners and first responders. “

            Ms. Mills says that Ohio community groups will be following the progress of the federal government’s enforcement actions against frackers that fail to file their chemical hazard information and will also be investigating other enforcement options for how citizens can insure that the EPCRA safeguards are in place at local fracking sites.

 

            To obtain a copy of the original petition please contact: tmills@chej.org

 

-          END    -

Click here for the US EPA Repsonse

Fracking waste keeps rolling into Ohio from other states

By Spencer Hunt

The Columbus Dispatch Monday July 1, 2013 6:42 AM

The shale drilling boom that has helped create a huge supply of cheap natural gas continues to bring more and more fracking waste into Ohio.

In 2012, 14.2 million barrels of fracking fluids and oil and gas waste were injected in Ohio disposal wells, according to data compiled by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. That’s a 12 percent increase from 2011.

That increase was driven by waste removed from Marcellus shale wells in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. State data show that Ohio disposal wells injected 8.16 million barrels of waste from other states, a 19 percent increase from 2011.

Environmental-advocacy groups, which consider spent fracking fluids a pollution threat to groundwater and streams, said the new numbers heighten their fears.

“I think we’ve been the sacrifice zone for the oil and gas industry long enough,” said Teresa Mills, fracking coordinator for the Buckeye Forest Council. “How much can we take before there are more earthquakes and before (drinking water) wells are contaminated?”

Oil and gas waste-disposal wells have operated in Ohio for decades. They drew public scrutiny last year after state officials linked a series of earthquakes in Youngstown in 2011 and 2012 to a nearby disposal well that is no longer operating.

Tom Stewart, vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, said he’s concerned that the influx of waste will create disposal delays for companies drilling Utica shale in Ohio.

Natural Resources officials said the wells are safe and that they have the capacity to handle these increases.

Mark Bruce, an agency spokesman, shared records that showed a 5 percent decrease in waste injections during the first three months of this year compared to the same period in 2012.

He attributed the decline to a decrease in shale drilling in Pennsylvania and increased recycling of fracking water.

“I don’t know if it will continue,” Bruce said of the decrease. “I just know that’s what we’re seeing so far.”

Much of the waste comes from fracking, a process that pumps millions of gallons of water, sand and chemicals deep below ground to shatter shale and free trapped oil and gas.

Some of the fluids bubble back up with the gas. Oil and gas wells also produce saltwater contaminated with metals and radioactive materials trapped underground for millions of years.

The flow of fracking waste into Ohio began in 2011 after Pennsylvania oil and gas regulators ordered businesses to stop dumping the salty wastes in that state’s streams. Unlike Ohio, Pennsylvania doesn’t have the authority to oversee and permit the drilling of its own disposal wells. Because companies have to apply for federal permits, approval of new wells can take months.

There are seven active disposal wells in Pennsylvania, that state’s Department of Environmental Protection says. There are 63 disposal wells in West Virginia.

As more waste comes into Ohio, companies are drilling more disposal wells — 191 so far, Natural Resources says. In January 2012, there were 177.

There also is little that state officials can do to keep out-of-state waste from Ohio wells. Federal commerce protections forbid one state from imposing tariffs or bans on legally shipped commodities from other states.

“We need to be very honest and look at ourselves and understand we are becoming the preferred destination for this waste,” said Jed Thorp, manager of the Sierra Club’s Ohio chapter.

“We need to figure out what we can do to keep that from happening.”