Ohio commission approves fracking in state parks and wildlife areas | Hacker News Reader

Ohio commission approves fracking in state parks and wildlife areas

apnews.com

140 pointsgeox76 comments

Do the tax payers get any money for these negative externalities?

Or is this just going to be a handout to whichever private company has the right connections with the right politicians?

Is this mainly going to benefit those politicians and private companies?

This isn't going to materially reduce gas prices for the average Ohio person to matter at all.

State parks are a huge amenity...

> Do the tax payers get any money for these negative externalities?

At least they should get vouchers for drinking water once their groundwater is polluted

Just my two cents, but this stuff is like having an medical procedure, WHO is doing the procedure is probably the most important element (e.g. do they do things the right way).

Also, I think regulators have been far too lax in the amount of environmental and P&A liability insurance/bonding that these companies are required to carry to support potential claims/cleanup etc. and those need to scale (along with regulations) exponentially the closer you are to population, drinking water, and food production.

The government receives severance tax for oil and gas extracted (0), income tax from employees working in oil industry, and the government is paid for the leases and royalty interest for production on the leases they grant.

(0) https://tax.ohio.gov/help-center/faqs/severance#:~:text=The%....

The fact that your link returns a ”403: forbidden” error is a delicious irony.

Are you connecting from outside the US?

> income tax from employees working in oil industry,

Everyone pays income taxes.

If the mob starts paying income taxes, is that a good reason to bring racketeering back?

Why are they paying the same mineral rights fees for extracting from a protected state park, as they would from non-protected land? Is a park designation utterly meaningless in Ohio?

Strictly speaking, criminal gains are taxable and you are technically required to declare any illegal income on your taxes.

As for racketeering, it never left. It's just a government institution now.

But oil is not uniformly distributed, if it is a marginal decision (probably unlikely in this case) then those are jobs not needed, and taxes forgone, the logic is sound on truly marginal cases, but it’s probably some fraction of that that is truly marginal

$0.1 tax per barrel of oil for anyone interested.

It's about a ~0.15% revenue tax at current oil prices.

I would put this in the category of almost entirely benefiting whoever has the right connections to the right politicians - with a meaningless tax to make it appear otherwise.

The royalty interest is probably the largest take for the government in this case. Typically that would be between 15% and 20% of the gross revenue generated by the leases.

25% is pretty common, I’ve seen 28%

> It's about a ~0.15% revenue tax at current oil prices

Out of curiosity, what is it on gross profit per barrel?

I think lifting cost are like ~$15/bbl so at $60/bbl (ex royalties on $80)it’s about double, but still not much, but you have to factor in the capital costs / IRR math, and that’s where it has the bigger impact - but no one is really making a marginal decision based on this

Which is fucking insane, right?

Imagine if I could walk into your house, take all your stuff, and pay you a "severance" tax of 0.125%.

The royalty is like ~20%, the severance tax isn’t super meaningful here.

Our politicians do not serve their citizens, they only serve their patrons

see below - not an advocate for this, but in most states these are fairly mature competitive bid processes. $115m upfront payment and 20% royalty get you in the ballpark what a deal might look like.

https://www.cleveland.com/open/2023/04/texas-driller-offers-...

"Under state law, the identities of those who nominated the land for oil and gas drilling are confidential"

Gotta love it.

Why? Either there is oil there or not. The geologic evidence can be evaluated without any knowledge of who conducted the research.

If it’s a politician and you dislike this, you may want to vote them out.

> A Cleveland.com investigation in September found that over a hundred Ohio residents said their names were attached to form letters sent to the commission in a public comment period without their knowledge — all of them urging state parks allow fracking.

> Those names included a 9-year-old girl and a blind woman. The form letter, which appears over 1,000 times in the public comment database, urges Ohio to “responsibly” lease rights to minerals under Salt Fork State Park, among other areas.

> The 9-year-old’s mother, Brittany Keep, told Cleveland.com that her daughter knows nothing about oil and gas exploration and neither of them have visited Salt Fork State Park.

Politicians enabling fraud. The members of the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission are public record, journalists should dig deep. All available evidence points to bad faith actions and sidestepping the will of local citizens for oil and gas interests attempting to ram this through.

Last time it was nuclear power plants: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ohio_nuclear_bribery_scandal

Cleveland.com's editors tend to be tools [0] for the same right wing that supports this stuff, and it forced out all its unionized journalists a few years ago, [1] so I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for "deep" reporting on this. I guess we can hope a small, underfunded, more independent paper in the state might do something with it.

[0] https://www.ideastream.org/2014-11-04/the-only-video-of-kasi...

[1] https://prospect.org/labor/busting-the-guild-in-cleveland/

I messaged ProPublica.

Ah. That’s a great idea.

It can be difficult and in some cases impossible to vote out bad politicians under first-past-the-post elections. Too many people run against them, splitting the votes such that the bad incumbent wins. This is why I advocate for electoral reform, as not much will get better without it.

Doesn’t FOIA work here? Government should not be allowed to work in the shadows. And no, this is not a national security issue.

Freedom of information explicitly excludes information confidential at the time of request.

On top of that, at least 900 people had their identities stolen and attached to forged pro-fracking letters that were used by the commission to justify allowing fracking.

According to the article, the commission knows, and will delete the forged letters from the public record, but apparently won't take use complaints as a reason to reconsider their decision.

This is so trash. I grew up in Texas and a neighborhood not far from mine had fracking occurring underneath it. So many people got strange cancers from this stuff, and it took decades to address it.

I thought fracking was just high pressure water or similar, do they add cancer inducing chemicals?

Thanks to the Halliburton Loophole, the compounds used to do fracking are legally protected against disclosure. You don't need to know what they're using, according to Congress.

Here you go: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_additives_used_for_fra...

Thanks for posting this, but the list in the USA is so long and full of likely toxic stuff, I want to vomit.

its by volume its almost all water and sand, but they add all sorts of other things to it (biocides, scale inhibitors, friction reducers, corrosion inhibitors, surfactants, etc.) and smarter people than me can tell you how bad that stuff is.

off topic of fracing, but chemcically treating older wells is a pretty common thing as well (mostly acid treatments)

“A Cleveland.com investigation in September found that over a hundred Ohio residents said their names were attached to form letters sent to the commission in a public comment period without their knowledge — all of them urging state parks allow fracking.

Those names included a 9-year-old girl and a blind woman. The form letter, which appears over 1,000 times in the public comment database, urges Ohio to ‘responsibly’ lease rights to minerals under Salt Fork State Park, among other areas.”

Would these people have standing to sue the Consumer Energy Alliance?

Considering Ohio's former house speaker was just sentenced to 20 years in prison for energy-related bribes, you'd think the Ohio government would be more transparent with its dealings.

Ohio's in a bad, but interesting, political situation. The state has clearly shifted red since the Obama elections but the sweeping 2010 election in favor of Republicans has turned the state into a gerrymandered mess. The state legislature is heavily tilted towards the Republicans and, as a result of Trump's popularity, they've become extremely MAGA. Meanwhile, you have a somewhat moderate (in comparison) Republican as governor, but he still supports the majority of these traditional conservative principles.

Since Ohio was a fairly moderate state for a long time, the MAGA legislature doesn't really align with voters' values, but there is a near zero chance of Republicans losing control due to the gerrymandered districts. All this is very unpopular. In fact, voters passed a bipartisan ballot initiative to help eliminate gerrymandered districts several years ago and it's been relatively useless as the districts were held up in court so long that they just defaulted to the previous districts in the last election.

As a result, Ohio has proactively utilized the citizen ballot initiative process to keep the legislature at bay. In August, Ohio struck down an attempt to increase the ballot initiative threshold to a 60% vote, keeping it as a simple majority. Last week, Ohio voters passed ballot initiatives to enshrine abortion rights in Ohio's constitution as well as legalize marijuana. Both these initiatives had a fairly large 55% win, indicating cross-party support, but both are something that would never have been done by the elected legislature.

Ohio still had +8% (53-45) for Republicans in the last presidential election. You're acting like Democrat voters are a majority held back by the legislature, but the presidential election isn't affected by gerrymandering. All of their more recent elections had an even starker difference. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Ohio_elections

I will point out that while you can't gerrymander a state-wide race, if you gerrymander enough other races, you can both actively-and-illegally, and passively-and-legally suppress voter turnout among people opposed to single-party rule.

But at this point, you are right - Ohio can safely be written off, like Florida.

Florida isn't a write off, it had a 3.4% margin and is worth a fight for it's outsized electoral votes.

> Ohio can safely be written off, like Florida.

So are you for or against single-party rule? The way you're putting this makes it clear that you think there is one right party to vote for.

>But at this point, you are right - Ohio can safely be written off, like Florida.

Legalizing cannabis and abortion choice in the most recent election clearly indicates otherwise.

If you ask an American whether or not they want a Democrat, or a Repulbican policy, Americans will overwhelmingly support the Democrat policies.

... And then they go to the polls and vote for Republicans who implement the exact opposite (Because they are only listening to their base, and their base is insane.)

I am not in Ohio, though the Republicans I know who are <60 years old do support MJ decriminalization.

I don't think it does. Pre-Trump, Ohio clearly had a large share of traditional conservative voters and leaders. However, when Trump came in and captured a ton of rust-belt Democrat support for Republicans, a lot of those traditional values did not come with the new support. That, and an aging boomer population being replaced with Gen X, Millenials, and Gen Z that hold much different beliefs on abortion and marijuana.

Ohio is very clearly a red state these days. Once Trump came in, he captured a lot of blue-collar democrats and they are now fully Republican. The gerrymandering just tilts the scales significantly more to ever overcome that majority. There is a big difference between the 8% win in 2020 and the 66% Republican majority in the Ohio house and 79% Republican majority in the Ohio senate.

FYI, Ohio just put Abortion into their constitution and legalized weed weeks ago. So I wouldn't count it as 'Fully republican" just yet. Although if that +8 holds for the 2024 election, I would concede this point.

> Ohio is very clearly a red state these days

Ohio’s margins are exceeded by its non-voters in multiples. (Half a million [1] versus three million.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

He's saying that Ohio's gerrymandering ensures that the hard right (MAGA) punches above its weight. He's saying that in Ohio, voters are politically closer to Kasich whereas the legislature is still firmly Householder.

> and it's been relatively useless as the districts were held up in court so long that they just defaulted to the previous districts in the last election.

Accurate, but additional context - the courts ruled that the districts did actually have to be remapped, but the Republicans in power just got stubborn and said "make us. make us. make us", i.e. it's not undecided, the politicians are just playing chicken with the court.

Stubborn? I’d say seditious.

The more I learn about stuff like this, which happens in many other places at either the same or different levels of government, the more I believe that democracy in the United States is effectively a sham.

Yea when republicans lose or have an outcome they don’t like they call democracy a sham as well.

> During a raucous meeting attended by many fracking opponents, the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission OK’d several parcels for fracking by outside entities — all of them owned by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources and the Ohio Department of Transportation — that include state parks and designated wildlife areas.

I read that as that the entities involved here _also_ own by "state parks and designated wildlife areas". Is that actually where the drilling is supposed to happen?

No the ownership refers to the parcels of land.

If you replace a coal burning power plant with a natural gas one you reduce emissions more than if you replace a natural gas one by a solar or wind power plant.

In the state of Ohio there are 15 coal power plants. Its 5 neighboring states count among them an astounding 119 coal power plants.

I would like you to show me where on a solar panel the emissions come from. I'll wait.

Solar panels don't produce emissions, no need to wait.

Ohio's right wing has apparently not engaged in an intimidation campaign against those who are opposed to this [0] and has not received tens of millions of dollars in bribes to make it happen [1], so by the standards of Ohio politics vis a vis energy policy... I have no words. I guess this isn't too bad? Except in all the obvious ways that it's bad.

[0] https://www.cleveland.com/open/2019/09/ohio-ag-to-investigat...

[1] https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdoh/pr/former-ohio-house-speak...

Headline from the near future: Ohio drilling companies declare bankruptcy, leave taxpayers on the hook for stranded assets and environmental damage

Irritating that fracking gets all the headlines. You wouldn't even notice it if it were happening under your feet right now. Drilling is what you will notice.

You’d notice fracking when the waste gets into the water table.

Please cite one example of an area where the drinking water has been rendered undrinkable by fracking.

See the links I responded with and the hundreds of other sources available on the internet.

Although well intentioned, they do not address the request, which given enough time and money any source can be rendered drinkable, but please do not water the trolls.

> which given enough time and money any source can be rendered drinkable,

Fewer people would have issues with resource extractors if they bonded over sufficient funds for a full remediation of all the damage they could do in the course of their operations.

They never do, because the liabilities there are almost unbounded, and doesn't gel with the fly-by-night can't-squeeze-blood-from-a-deadbeat nature of most drillers.

> Please cite one example of an area where the drinking water has been rendered undrinkable by fracking.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/abs/10.1073/pnas.1100682108

[Pennsylvania and New York] "we document systematic evidence for methane contamination of drinking water"

The average concentration of the methane detected in the water wells near drilling sites fell within a range that the U.S. Department of Interior says is dangerous and requires urgent “hazard mitigation” action.

Which while not unheard of, is rare. Most water wells use fracking these days. It is a method of creating a local porus section of earth. I wish they would just say natural gas well, the fracking itself, when done correctly, is not generally the biggest envirnmental concern. Usually it is the wellcap and infrastructure that is.

P.s. pretty please stop fighting pipelines if you care about the environment. Trucking and shipping of oil are vastly dirtier, with more spills and in absolute best cases, the pollution from rail shipment.

We need to stop the oil too, not only the pipelines.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/fracking-can-cont...

https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/news/story/study-links-fracki...

https://www.consumerreports.org/water-contamination/how-frac...

https://www.propublica.org/series/fracking

From your first link:

> After numerous rounds of testing by both the state of Wyoming and EPA, there is no evidence that the water quality in domestic wells in the Pavillion Field has changed as a result of oil and gas operations; no oil and gas constituents were found to exceed drinking water standards in any samples taken

There's not a single chemical used industrially that can't be found in some amount in the water supply. Wake me up when something exceeds safe levels.

The quote you pulled from the article is literally the oil company's PR rep - and the claim is addressed later with full context how the labs weren't equipped to handle fracking testing since they were setup for different purposes. From later:

> Since 2012, a trove of new data had accumulated from USGS, EPA and state regulators. He obtained EPA’s methanol testing results through a Freedom of Information Act request and downloaded the rest of the information from the Wyoming oil and gas regulator’s website. All of it was publicly available, waiting for the right person to spend a year crunching the information.

> The end result: a peer-reviewed study that reaffirms EPA’s findings that there was something suspicious going on in Pavillion. More research is needed.

> The sampling wells contained methanol. They also contained high levels of diesel compounds, suggesting they may have been contaminated by open pits where operators had stored chemicals, DiGiulio said.

I've seen fracking proponents earnestly arguing that the pollution in local water supplies wasn't from the fracking, but from the other associated activities e.g. wastewater disposal and some of these open-pit storage options. Kind of important that those associated activities literally only exist due to the fracking!

It's definitely true that in well-run sites with well-regulated wastewater and inspection regimes, fracking can happen with very little impact on groundwater or surface water -- it's also definitely true that there's a very strong profit motive for operators to cut corners and that in many places, they're in bed with the regulators which leads to a lot of otherwise avoidable pollution. It's alluring to claim that fracking is safe because it can be performed safely -- but the reality on the ground is much more mixed.

Do you or have you ever lived near a fracking installation? I have and I can garauntee that it is completely noticable.

There’s more types of pollution than just water.

I used to work at a company that was hired to do air monitoring on fracking sites. I wouldn’t want to live near one.

I also think it’s outrageous that the government allows any sort of mineral extraction on conservation sites, regardless of pollution. That’s not the intent of conservation land.

I think it is outrageous the government owns any land, outside of military bases and the Legislature and Governor buildings. Ownership of resources by government encourages these wasteful political battles. A poor government has little to steal from, so people instead will focus on productive private activities.

I mean, it's true - the most disruptive and destructive part of fracking is the work on the surface, like the clearing for drill pads and access roads and water works. That said, you can't frack without these.

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