30 Organizations Demand Moratorium on Fracking Ohio State Parks and Public Lands

Save Ohio Parks and 29 other organizations from across the state delivered a letter to Gov. Mike DeWine demanding a moratorium on new and pending nominations, bids, and leases to frack Ohio’s beloved state parks, wildlife areas, and other public lands.

You can find the letter here and read it below.

February 3, 2025

Gov. Mike DeWine
Vern Riffe Center, 30th Floor
77 S. High St.
Columbus, OH 43215-6117

Dear Gov. Mike DeWine,

Save Ohio Parks, along with the undersigned organizations across Ohio, demand that you call a moratorium considering any new or pending nominations, bids and leases to frack under Ohio’s beloved and pristine state parks and public lands. This you must do until the state of Ohio can guarantee the safety and well being of all Ohio’s families and communities.

The Jan. 2 explosion and fire on a Gulfport Appalachia well pad in Antrim, Guernsey County, just five miles from Salt Fork State Park demonstrates the personal danger and health risks to all who live nearby or visit parks and wildlife areas close to gas and oil infrastructure. 

Here are six reasons you must halt all new and pending nominations, bids and leases to frack Ohio’s public lands:

• Ohio remains unprepared for a major accident. The Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) does not have a hazardous materials team. One volunteer fire department chief supervised the Jan. 2 accident, in which 13,062 gallons of gas and oil condensate and radioactive brine waste in a storage tank exploded, emitting flames and clouds of black smoke up to 100 feet high. Area residents within a half-mile radius of Antrim were evacuated for 18 hours.
  
  Neither the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency, Ohio Department of Health nor a trained radiation team were called to the site to test the air, surrounding water and soils for dangerous carcinogens and radioactive waste, potentially endangering all residents and livestock living and working in the rural area.
  
  
• Chemicals in the industry are dangerous and unregulated. Gas condensate consists of chemical hydrocarbons like propane, butane, hexane and pentane, as well as PFAS and other volatile organic chemicals (VOCs). These chemicals are carcinogenic and can cause illness and death in animals and people. Illnesses can include long-term health issues like cancer, asthma, COPD, low fertility, low thyroid, hormone disruption, irregular or rapid heart rate, and even sudden death.
  
  
• The accident-prone industry has resulted in nearly 2,000 Ohio gas and oil accidents over the last eight years. There have been 97 instances of gas and oil-related accidents in Guernsey County alone from 2016 to 2024, according to ODNR records.
  
  In 2012, a man was killed in a well pad explosion in Bolivar, Ohio, 65 miles south of Cleveland.
  
  In 2018, an explosion at the XTO Energy well pad at Powhatan Point in Belmont County leaked methane gas into the air for 21 days, emitting enough atmosphere-warming methane as three European countries over a year. The leak was so large it was discovered by climate scientists via satellite. It was considered the largest methane leak to that date.
  
  In 2023, a water truck struck a Hilcorp wellhead in Columbiana County, causing a 28-hour methane leak that required the evacuation of 450 people within a mile radius.
  
  In 2024, the Austin Master frack waste facility in Martins Ferry was shut down after ODNR discovered it was storing 10,000 tons of radioactive waste when it was permitted for only 600 tons. The facility was located 150 feet from the Ohio River; its floor containing radioactive waste was just inches from being flooded during a rainstorm before the river subsided. A $6 million clean up has been announced, yet its facility CEO has not paid for the cleanup. The ongoing Ohio attorney general lawsuit is seeking to recover costs of the cleanup from the CEO; however the company claims they have no money – which begs the question of whether taxpayers will ultimately pay for this.
  
  
• The state engages in poor waste management practices. The gas and oil industry uses up to 1,000 different chemicals, many determined to be carcinogenic. It creates a trillion gallons of salty oil and gas brine annually, along with millions of tons of radioactive waste. As part of current oil and gas production practice, radioactive oil and gas waste is injected deep underground for storage, an unsafe method, thus depleting and contaminating Ohio’s fresh drinking water supply. Fracking wells have increased their water usage seven-fold since 2011 because technology allows them to drill thousands of feet horizontally. They can use up to 40 million gallons of water to frack a single gas well, draining our lakes, streams and creeks of fresh water while Ohio is still in a moderate drought.
  
  Because the fracking process brings radium to the surface along with methane gas, the left-over brine, or “produced water” brought with it is often highly radioactive. It’s undrinkable ever again. It’s regarded a hazardous waste, yet is transported away in un-placarded trucks, then stored in one of Ohio’s 234, Class II injection wells, which can leak, endangering aquifers and causing low-level earthquakes.
  
  The high levels of Radium 226 and 228  which it may contain are bone-seeking elements that cause cancer in humans. Radium 226 has a half-life of 1,600 years.
  
  
• The Ohio Department of Health has not studied the human health effects of living near gas and oil production areas in Ohio. However, we do have information from the Compendium of Scientific, Medical, and Media Findings Demonstrating Risks and Harms of Fracking and Associated Gas and Oil Infrastructure, a compilation of 2,500 peer-reviewed medical and scientific articles and government reports on the health effects of fracking in its 9^th year of publication.
  
  Its 2023 edition states that its “examination uncovered no evidence that fracking can be practiced in a manner that does not threaten human health directly or without imperiling climate stability upon which human health depends.”
  
  
• The state of Ohio cannot guarantee tourists and people living near our state parks will be safe when another accident occurs. The state of Ohio has an $8 billion annual tourism industry that provides jobs and livelihoods for many, many Ohioans. What would happen if a gas and oil well pad exploded at the height of the summer tourist season? How would park visitors be informed of such an explosion, much less evacuated?  And what would happen if thousands of people attempt to exit a park that has only one or two roads out?

Salt Fork State Park, which is slated to have 5,704 acres fracked by Infinity Natural Resources, will have nine well pads circling it, with likely at least four storage tanks on each pad. These well pads may be built as close as 1,000 feet away from park borders. Well pads can be located a mere distance of 150 feet from area homes.

Save Ohio Parks and allied organizations listed below decry the state of Ohio’s unconstitutional law requiring fracking our state parks and public lands;  its lax preparation for accidents that endanger people and property; its poor regulation of the gas and oil industry that permits it to ignore individual landowner property rights and take their mineral rights for its own and shareholder profits; and its callous and dangerous policies regarding the health, environmental, freshwater protection, waste storage and climate-warming methane and greenhouse gas emissions from fracking under Ohio’s public lands.

One only has to look to the early 2023 East Palestine train derailment and vinyl chloride explosion to see how release of volatile chemicals can destroy tight-knit communities. Some East Palestine residents experiencing debilitating and ongoing illnesses from breathing contaminated air continue to suffer and are considering moving away from homes they’ve lived in for generations.

The people of Ohio were lucky there were no injuries or deaths at the Gulfport well pad explosion on Jan. 2. But luck is not a good strategy to keep our air, water and soils clean and people’s health protected from the volatile and dangerous fossil fuel energy industry.

We want a truly wise Ohio energy policy that protects our state parks, wildlife areas, state forests, colleges and universities, Ohio Department of Transportation land and other public lands in perpetuity, as they were promised to us beginning in 1949.

Ohio’s state parks and public lands make up only 4% of Ohio’s total acreage, ranking us 44^th among the 50 states. Gas and oil has access to the other 96%. Our children, who need clean and natural spaces for their healthy development, desperately need to be protected from the industrialization fracking causes.

We want a statewide energy policy that utilizes renewable energy to protect future generations from methane emissions that heat the planet and accelerate climate change.

We know renewable energy is the energy of the future, and Ohioans deserve to participate in the job creation and economic development that will result from it.

We also know that fossil fuel energy demand is falling because of high infrastructure and debilitating environmental costs compared to clean and truly green solar, wind, hydro and geothermal costs. We also know that if Ohio continues to invest in fossil fuel energy, it will find itself attached to an uncertain and short-term oil and gas revenue stream at the expense of permanent destruction of our clean air, fresh water and healthy, rich soils.

To summarize, Ohio is not adequately prepared for the next gas and oil accident. We demand that a moratorium be declared, allowing time to wisely diagnose and address the risks we have outlined. If not, we predict there will be a major environmental accident in a fracked area of our state, negatively affecting people, animals, air, freshwater, and soils.

If that accident occurs during the summer tourist season near a crowded state park or public land, with hundreds or even thousands of families and tourists visiting an area, panic and chaos could ensue, resulting in the loss of people’s lives.

Sincerely,

Save Ohio Parks
Athens Conservancy
Athens County’s Future Action Network (ACFAN)
Between the Waters
Buckeye Environmental Network
Clintonville Green Team
Columbus Community Bill of Rights
Concerned Ohio River Residents
Communities United for Action (CUFA)
Dayton Energy Collaborative
Faith Communities Together for a Sustainable Future (FaCT)
FracTracker Alliance
FreshWater Accountability Project Ohio
Green Sanctuary Committee, First Unitarian Universalist Society of Marietta, OH
Heartwood
The Leave No Child Inside Central Ohio Collaborative
Mid-Ohio Valley Climate Action
Mill Creek Alliance
Move to Amend Ohio Network
Nature Can Heal
Ohio Nuclear Free Network
Ohio Valley Allies
Ohio Youth for Climate Justice
Sierra Club Ohio
Solid Waste Caucus
Sunrise Columbus
Sunrise Movement – Athens
Sunrise Oberlin
Sustainable Medina County
Th!rd Act Ohio