Ohio urgently needs a toughened, more transparent fracking-waste permit process

By Editorial Board, cleveland.com, and The Plain Dealer
December 10^th, 2025

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Ohio has become a state of easy virtue for readily allowing “fracking waste” – the hazardous byproducts of the high-pressure slurries injected to extract oil and natural gas from shale far below Earth’s surface – to be pumped so compliantly into Ohio land. Much of the waste now being disposed of in Ohio’s deep-injection wells doesn’t even originate in the state. Yet it has the potential to cause earthquakes or — of far greater concern — to migrate into Ohioans’ drinking water.

Ohio has become a prime regional repository of fracking waste originating throughout local oil-shale country, which includes eastern Ohio, western Pennsylvania and parts of West Virginia.

Part of the reason, no question, is eastern and southeast Ohio’s waste-disposal-friendly geology. As cleveland.com’s Peter Krouse recently reported, Ohio has become regional Dumpster No. 1 for fracking’s many hazardous-waste byproducts from throughout the resource-rich Marcellus and Utica shale regions of eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania.

Yet, outrageously, this is happening without a requirement in Ohio to reveal what those toxins are — and via a permitting system that seems geared to oblige oil and gas interests above the right of Ohioans to be protected from toxic spills, underground waste migration or earthquakes caused by the high-pressure injection of so much waste into the bedrock.

This laissez-faire attitude traces to a feckless General Assembly that seems determined to be at the beck and call of a relentless gas-and-oil lobby. The lobby enjoys a Statehouse edge because fracking can be a source of jobs in impoverished Appalachian Ohio, despite the region’s scars from earlier extractive undertakings, such as strip-mining for coal.

This is also why Ohio’s government has gone all-in for fracking the lands under state parks, as required by a 2022 law administered by the five-member state Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, chaired by the state Natural Resources director, an appointee of Republican Gov. Mike DeWine. Little surprise, Ohio’s fracking-friendly legislators require that two of the four other Land Management commissioners must be “recommended by a statewide organization representing the oil and gas industry.”

Moreover, Substitute Senate Bill 315 of 2012, signed by GOP then-Gov. John R. Kasich, lets frackers shroud the chemicals they use by terming them as “trade secrets,” which hides those chemicals’ data from Ohio’s Open Records Law – that is, from voters, taxpayers and injection wells’ neighboring landowners.

To say that SB 315 needs to be repealed so that Ohioans know what’s being shipped, injected, and now disposed of beneath the lands that are Ohioans’ patrimony would be an understatement.

But among those voting “yes” on that 2012 trade-secrets gimmick were Republican then-state Sens. Keith Faber, of Celina, now Ohio’s auditor; Frank LaRose, of Upper Arlington, now secretary of state; and then-Rep. Matt Huffman, a Lima Republican, now the Ohio House’s all-powerful speaker.

All told, those facts don’t just suggest — they shout — that the General Assembly must toughen the state’s oversight of deep-well injection of hazardous fracking waste in Ohio. For example, it’s a safe bet that many Ohioans would oppose letting an all-but-anonymous state board OK, say, nuclear waste sites just about any place in Ohio. Are chemical waste sites any less concerning? Curious Ohioans might want to use their web browsers to search for the terms “Love Canal” and “Niagara Falls toxins.”

Then there’s the threat to drinking water. Krouse reported that the Buckeye Environmental Network, represented by Earthjustice, sued the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) on Nov. 7 in the 10th Ohio District Court of Appeals in Columbus, opposing its approval of two new fracking-waste-injection wells just outside Washington County’s seat, Marietta, as proposed by DeepRock Disposal Solutions LLC.

The injection wells, the plaintiffs assert, would be “approximately 2 miles from Marietta’s and Warren Township’s municipal water systems.” And the plaintiffs assert the state failed to use current permitting standards designed to better protect groundwater resources in approving the proposed wells.

When it comes to out-of-state waste, it appears Ohio cannot constitutionally refuse to store it, per the Constitution’s Commerce Clause, which gives Congress broad power to regulate interstate commerce and restricts states “from impairing interstate commerce.”

But that doesn’t mean Ohio has to trundle out the welcome wagon for demonstrably risky fracking waste produced here or anywhere. The first priority of the DeWine administration, and of the General Assembly, should be to protect Ohio’s environment — not risk it to benefit profiteers.

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Editor’s note: This editorial was updated at 5.05 p.m. to correct the name of the group — Buckeye Environmental Network — that is suing the Ohio Department of Natural Resources over Ohio’s approval of two new fracking-waste-injection wells near Marietta.