ODNR has failed to protect our water against fracking industry
It was not surprising but still appalling that last week the Ohio Department of Natural Resources found no substantive objections to the solution mining permit for the Powhatan Salt Company to carve out underground storage caverns in Monroe County next to the Ohio
River.
These caverns are planned to support the fracking industry and associated petrochemical buildout in the region. Despite the many valid objections that were filed, the permit was issued. We wonder what a valid objection would look like to the ODNR, because we have yet to see a permit denied because of one. Even expert comments are found to be insubstantial.
There is a pattern here. Since fracking came to Ohio, the highly unregulated industry and its massive amounts of waste became a revenue stream for the state. The valid objections to the many fracking wells, injection wells and now the solution mining of the proposed caverns, are summarily dismissed.
Fracking permanently destroys massive amounts of freshwater. The solution mining to carve out the caverns will require billions of additional gallons to be destroyed. The ODNR allows water to be taken without considering the overall cumulative impacts of these extreme withdrawals.
Fracking turns the region’s precious freshwater into a toxic soup of radioactive, toxic and proprietary chemicals that are falsely labeled as “non-hazardous” so they can be cheaply disposed of in injection wells. These wells are already known to leak and migrate, potentially polluting remaining surface and groundwater resources without the ability to remediate.
The ODNR has the authority to do a better job of regulating, but they do not, taking a “nothing to see here” stance when they are not even looking. When it is found that there is too little water left for environmental flow for streams in Southeast Ohio, and not enough safe water left for drinking, there will be hearings and blaming, but it will be too late.
We do not need to sacrifice our water for more fracking, salt cavern storage or petrochemical ethane cracker plants for more plastic. The Ohio River needs to be protected from fracking and its associated downstream infrastructure, such as injection wells and polluting petrochemical plants.
Instead of being a captured regulatory agency, the ODNR needs to do its job and protect the environment and public health instead of facilitating fracking, cheap fracking waste disposal and fracking gas storage for petrochemicals.
Lea (Leatra) Harper, Managing Director, Freshwater Accountability Project