Ohio senator’s fracking waste business is ‘dangerous’ for drinking water, Marietta council president says
Signal Ohio
August 14, 2025
Public Safety
The city is fighting a fifth fracking waste injection well planned near its drinking water source. Marietta’s council president clashed with her state senator, whose former business, which has a history of engineering failures, is seeking the permit.
It was supposed to be a sleepy, county-level Republican meeting where political allies get on the same page.
Instead, it turned into a personal and professional clash between two ranking Southeast Ohio officials from the same party over clean drinking water.
Marietta City Council President Susan Vessels ripped into Ohio Sen. Brian Chavez, claiming the fracking waste disposal industry – including a local business Chavez ran for years – is threatening the water supply.
The 12 minutes of remarks from Vessels, a lawyer who has served on the council since 2019, began after Chavez called the city council’s behavior on the issue “outrageous.”
The clash amounted to a biting, face-to-face exchange, all in front of a crowd of local officials and party diehards at an Aug. 4 meeting of the Washington County Republican Executive Committee.
Besides the public health threat, Vessels accused Chavez of a conflict of interest because of his ownership stakes and leadership roles in the oil and gas business as he leads the Senate Energy Committee. Chavez is a Republican whose deeply conservative district spans much of the gas producing region of Southeast Ohio. He was appointed to his seat to fill a vacancy in late 2023 and won election to a four-year term the following year.
The public fracas is over fracking waste
The fracas revolved around Class II injection wells, deep siloes in the earth that host massive volumes of toxic, industrial waste from the fracking industry at high pressure thousands of feet underground. A single fracking well can require millions of gallons of water, producing vast sums of waste to be disposed of.
Regulators are considering public comments over a project application from Deep Rock Disposal Solutions, which Chavez led as CEO until 2024. That would be the fifth injection well in the area. All five together, according to the council’s written objections, could pump 1 million gallons of waste per day underground, all within 1.8 miles of the protective area around city aquifers serving 32,000 people.
“These aquifers are in a situation where if they ever get infiltrated, they will be ruined,” Vessels said at the meeting.
Chavez dismissed concerns at the meeting, insinuating that foreign oil interests were paying for the political advocacy against injection wells and stating that fracking brine is largely harmless and the injection wells are structurally sound.
Ohio allows 1.4 billion gallons of fracking waste injection per year
Ohio is home to an extraordinary number of such wastewater disposal sites, whose operators are permitted to inject nearly 1.4 billion gallons of waste underground per year statewide, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources. That’s enough to fill up more than 2,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
In at least seven instances since 2019, according to formal suspension orders from ODNR, fracking waste migrated outward from those injection sites and reached the surface via other oil and gas wells as far as six miles away. This has stirred up anxiety around the community from oil and gas producers, local water officials and environmentalists who worry that if the brine can breach oil wells, perhaps it can breach aquifers too.
Four other injection wells nearby pose serious risks of failure, according to the city’s written objections based on ODNR data the city obtained via public records requests and private well sampling.
‘It is something that we should be concerned about’
Chavez, who addressed the GOP event first, insisted that proper engineering ensures that brine stays trapped in its injection zone. He was the CEO of Deep Rock when ODNR suspended two of its wells after determining they leaked brine underground. Both he and Deep Rock are named defendants in two lawsuits before the Ohio Supreme Court related to brine leakage.
He downplayed the well-known radioactive properties of fracking waste, telling the Republicans present that fracking brine is no more radioactive than a banana.
Vessels said she wasn’t buying the happy talk. If brine was so safe, we wouldn’t spend so much to store it 6,000 feet underground, she said. Plus, the state’s oil and gas chief wrote in his 2023 suspension order of the two Deep Rock injection wells that continued operation was “likely to contaminate land, surface water or subsurface water” and thus “presents an imminent danger to the health and safety of the public” as well as the environment.
“So it is something that’s dangerous, it is something that we should be concerned about,” she said.
Chavez called the city council’s opposition ‘outrageous’
Vessels questioned why ethics rules allow Chavez to lead the energy committee, which recently spearheaded legislation designed to spur natural gas development in Ohio, given his “interest” in the industry. Alongside his former leadership of Deep Rock, Chavez owns a spread of oil and gas businesses operating in the region, financial disclosure forms show.
While Chavez disclosed no ongoing ownership of Deep Rock, his wife, Christyann, arranged for the company’s lawyer to speak at a recent council meeting on the company’s behalf, according to a copy of a text message Vessels provided. A Chavez aide didn’t respond to a question on the matter.
Trustees of the Warren Community Water and Sewer Association, which services 2,500 taps in the area, have held public meetings in town voicing concerns about fracking waste breaching aquifers. The ODNR has expressed concern about the same. And the Marietta City Council, led by Vessels, recently held an informational meeting that included testimony from engineers, geologists, regulators, environmentalists, and Deep Rock’s attorney.
Chavez called the actions of the council “outrageous” at the county GOP meeting, which seemed to trigger the back-and-forth.
“You know, I hate to have you point fingers and say that I’ve done something ‘outrageous’ with my meeting when it was three hours of educating the city council so that we might be able to make decisions that are in the benefit of this community,” Vessels said.
“This is a concern, especially when you consider the volume that you are permitted under the old rules to inject under our feet. You’re permitted to inject per well under our feet 5,000 barrels [210,000 gallons] a day.”
Chavez says injection wells are harmless
Signal Ohio previously reported extensively on the wastewater injection migration problems in Washington County. Chavez at first declined interview requests for the report and later agreed to an interview before canceling it without explanation.
His comments at the hearing amount to some of his most substantive public remarks about injection wells.
He said the “extreme environmentalists” of the Buckeye Environmental Network have been holding “fake town halls” and “making these outrageous claims and not talking to the experts” like the Ohio Oil and Gas Association or the Ohio Natural Energy Institute, both trade associations comprised of industry operators.
He claimed Saudi Arabia and China are funding the political opposition to natural gas as a means to ensure America depends on foreign oil imports.
“I want folks to understand. I don’t want them to be scared. I don’t want them to feel like we’re on the edge of disaster because we’re not. This is being injected 5,000 feet, more than a mile deep. There’s impervious layers. There’s multiple steel casings, concrete, steel, concrete. There’s like seven different layers around it,” he said.
“It’s hard to understand that something 5,000 feet is not going to go over and then up. It’s far more likely that the septic tanks along Route 7 are going to fail and contaminate the outcrop from the top.”
After the hearing, Chavez approached Vessels to apologize, she said in an interview. Chavez didn’t respond to inquiries about Vessels’ comments.
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