Data centers killing Ohio’s beloved parks before our very eyes

If local officials accept data centers, rural Appalachia, our state parks and public lands and even our villages, towns and suburbs will all be turned into fracking sacrifice zones.

By Cathy Cowan Becker

The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, on March 27, took 13 minutes to rubber-stamp fracking of 8,749 acres of Egypt Valley Wildlife Area and Salt Fork State Park – despite 1,337 public comments opposed.

That was just the start.

Another 8,366 acres of Egypt Valley have been nominated for fracking, likely to be rubber-stamped at the commission’s next meeting.

As board president of Save Ohio Parks, I’ve seen two dozen nominations for parks and wildlife areas and three dozen nominations for highway land go through this commission over the last three years.

But never have I seen over 17,000 acres of our public lands nominated – much less approved – in such a short time. The question is, why?

The answer is two words: data centers.

No public input needed

According to Data Center Map, there are 201 data centers in Ohio, with 113 in central Ohio. Another 77 projects are proposed or under development.

Thanks to House Bill 15, passed last year, each data center can get state approval for a major gas plant to power its operations in just 45 days – with no public notice, no public information session and no public hearing.

That’s exactly what happened at the Amazon data center on Scioto-Darby Creek Road in Hilliard. The largest fracked gas fuel cell in North America was approved with no public notice, information session or hearing to power this data center “behind the meter” – meaning power never goes onto the grid. It’s meant to provide private power to Amazon.

The gas fuel cell will emit 1.45 million pounds of carbon dioxide every day – directly next to hundreds of homes, an elementary school, a park and the county’s largest animal shelter. The emissions are the equivalent of 66,000 additional gas-powered vehicles per day.

It received automatic approval from the Public Utilities Commission of Ohio – meaning no formal vote – and got an air permit from the Ohio EPA before anyone knew what was happening.

That’s the plan for other data centers across the state.

Our parks are being carved up for ‘glorious times’

The village of Ashville, population 5,000, is dealing with a proposal to build a data center campus whose footprint would be as large as the village itself – powered by an 800- megawatt gas facility located directly next to schools and soccer fields where children play.

And a 9.2 gigawatt gas plant – enough to power more than half of Ohio – is proposed for the site of a former uranium enrichment plant to power a massive data center complex in Pike County, which already has an early death rate 107 times the national average.

Where is all this gas going to come from? You guessed it – our state parks and public lands.

This isn’t conjecture. House Speaker Matt Huffman and Senate President Rob McColley told the Ohio Oil and Gas Association that was their intent.

Fracking our parks for gas to power data centers is a “ripe opportunity,” McColley said, according to a March 5 Gongwer News Service article. 

“We are at the front of some very glorious times,” Huffman told the association.

If there’s one thing I could tell local government officials, it’s this:

If you approve a data center, then you will likely get a gas plant, and there won’t be anything you can do about it. The state can and will put a fracked gas plant next to homes, schools, businesses and parks. The only way to prevent a gas plant from being forced into your neighborhood is to prevent the data center from going there in the first place.

The gas will come from practically the only un-fracked land in Appalachian Ohio – our parks and wildlife areas. This will produce billions of gallons of toxic and radioactive waste that is injected into disposal wells, where it is known to migrate into abandoned wells, production wells and threatens drinking water.

It’s what the state legislature wants – and if local officials accept data centers, rural Appalachia, our state parks and public lands and even our villages, towns and suburbs will all be turned into fracking sacrifice zones.

Put a stop to it now.

Support a moratorium on building new data centers and fracking our public land. Our land, water and air were meant to be held in public trust for future generations – not sacrificed for Big Tech and Big Oil profits.

Cathy Cowan Becker is board president of Save Ohio Parks, a statewide nonprofit citizens group concerned about oil and gas extraction from Ohio public lands. The organization is dedicated to educating Ohio’s about fracking’s health, environmental and planet-warming harms.

Photo: Egypt Valley Wildlife Area, all 18,000 acres of which has been nominated for fracking.

This commentary was originally published in the Columbus Dispatch on April 28, 2026.