Sunday, November 24th, a carload of interested people traveled through Noble and Belmont Counties in Southeastern Ohio to see fracking country up close.
Three of us standing in front of a compressor/well/pipeline distribution point in Guernsey County that used to be the farm that my two boys lived on. Close to 50 feet of the hill was shaved off to accomodate the compressor seen in the background.
Above: a common site in eastern Ohio where facilities flare to burn off methane, creating other problems with VOC's, black carbon, and CO2 releases. This is the backside of the compressor that our tour members are standing in front of in the first picture.
Even after seeing many sites over the years, I was shocked to smell the fumes from the Humphries compressor in Belmont County. It smelled to me like death, an indescribable smell, that affected my sinuses and olfactory for the rest of the day.
Humphries Compressor in Belmont Cty Farm next to the compressor
I tagged along with EarthWorks on a FLIR camera tour in 2015. The landowner who leased to MarkWest complained that some cattle were sick. We visited a neighbor who had sore throats every day and three of her six dogs were sick from the fumes. She had stopped allowing her grandchildren to visit.
Above: we counted seven of these brine tankers leaving the wellpad a mile south of Belmont, OH, pictured on the right. I assume they were taking flowback from a recently fracked well on the pad to an injection well in Ohio. Each of those trucks carries about 5000 gallons of toxic, radioactive "brine" liquid. Oil & gas are the only industry that is allowed to carry this hazardous waste across source water protection areas. One of these tankers overturned in 2016, causing one of Barnesville's water reservoirs to shut down for two months.
In 2017, 32,441,352 barrels (1,362,536,784 gallons - yes, 1.3 billion) of liquid frack waste was injected into more than 240 Ohio injection wells. Half of that was from out-of-state wells (PA & WV mainly).
The drilling rig on the right is laying pipe for a new lateral well. Many of the pads we saw had seven wells on them.
In Colorado, pads have as many as 25 wells on them. That can be expected in Ohio, if the intended petrochemical complex is built on the Ohio River, funded by companies from Thailand and China.
Above: Pritts water impoundment in Belmont County. Flowback from fracked wells is stored in this open air containment pond for weeks or months until it is either tankered to injection wells or evaporates. A lined pit like this leaked recently in Pennsylvania, contaminating a water source.
This "pond" is one of more than 40 frack waste facilities in Ohio that have been built without proper regulatory criteria. In 2013, Governor Kasich mandated that ODNR write the regulations for these facilities, however the chief of Oil & Gas authorized permits for these facilities without the rules being written. They still have not been written as mandated. Who is the state of Ohio regulating? It most certainly is NOT the oil & gas industry ... so it must be YOU and ME!!
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