Ohio Officials Growing Wary Of Fracking Waste

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Ohio Gov­er­nor John Kasich wants to grow his state’s drilling indus­try, but he’s wary of all the frack­ing fluid being trucked in from Pennsylvania

Ohio Gov­er­nor John Kasich is a big sup­porter of nat­ural gas drilling, but that doesn’t mean he wants Pennsylvania’s frack­ing waste. As this Bloomberg News arti­cle reports, the Buck­eye State took in 369 mil­lion gal­lons of used frack­ing fluid last year.

Much of that liq­uid came from Penn­syl­va­nia. Kasich and other Ohio offi­cials are look­ing for ways to lower the state’s frack­ing fluid intake, with­out run­ning afoul of the con­sti­tu­tion, which bars states from lim­it­ing spe­cific indus­tries within their bor­ders. “When peo­ple are using our things, and they could dis­rupt our abil­ity to have progress here, we have to be con­cerned about it,” Kasich told Bloomberg. “We’re think­ing about what we can do and not vio­late the inter­state com­merce clause.”

The under­ground wells the fluid is being injected into, of course, has been linked to recent Ohio earth­quakes.

From the Bloomberg report:

Of the almost 22 mil­lion gal­lons of waste­water that Pennsylvania’s Mar­cel­lus shale oper­a­tors sent to dis­posal wells in the first six months of 2011, nearly 99 per­cent went to Ohio, accord­ing to pro­duc­tion reports from the Penn­syl­va­nia Envi­ron­men­tal Pro­tec­tion Department.

Penn­syl­va­nia has six active Class II wells com­pared with 177 in Ohio in part because the geo­log­i­cal for­ma­tions in the state’s east aren’t per­me­able, and because until recent years, the state allowed drillers to dis­charge brine into streams or take it to treat­ment plants, Steve Platt, an EPA hydrol­o­gist in Philadel­phia, said in a tele­phone interview.

Fluid recy­cled or sent to dis­posal wells increased after the state started lim­it­ing waste­water sent to treat­ment plants in 2010, Kevin Sun­day, a spokesman for the Penn­syl­va­nia depart­ment, said in a tele­phone inter­view from Harrisburg.