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Bloomburg News By Lisa Song - Dec 3, 2012 InsideClimateNews.org -- For years, the controversy over natural gas drilling has focused on the water and air quality problems linked to hydraulic fracturing, the process where chemicals are blasted deep underground to release tightly bound natural gas deposits. But a new study reports that a set of chemicals called non-methane hydrocarbons, or NMHCs, ...
This action follows the action camp hosted by Appalachia Resist! which served as a training for an ever widening group of community members, including farmers, landowners, and families who want to join the resistance to injection wells and the fracking industry in Southeast Ohio.  With this action, Appalachia Resist! sends the message to the oil and gas industry that our ...
For Immediate Release Athens (OH) County Fracking Action Network, acfan.org Sept. 12, 2012 contact: Roxanne Groff, 740-707-3610, grofski@earthlink.net, acfanohio@gmail.com A public notice for an Athens County injection well permit application for the Atha well on Rte. 144 near Frost, OH, has been posted.  Citizens have until Sept. 28 to send in comments and concerns about the application ...
August 1, 2012   FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE   Contacts: Alison Auciello, Food & Water Watch, (513) 394-6257, aauciello@fwwatch.org / Council Member Laure Quinlivan, City of Cincinati, (513) 352-5303, Laure.Quinlivan@cincinnati-oh.gov       Cincinnati Becomes First Ohio City to Ban Injection Wells CINCINNATI, Ohio—Following today’s unanimous vote by the Cincinnati City Council to ban injection wells associated with ...
To the Editor: Wayne National Forest leaders and spokespersons expressed satisfaction with Wednesday's "open forum" on high-volume horizontal hydraulic fracturing (HVHHF) on forest lands: a first in their history. It's hard to understand this satisfaction. Anne Carey, Wayne supervisor, said the forum was intended to inform; public participants disputed the "facts." Wayne spokesperson Gary Chancey repeatedly listed participating Wayne ...
Our energy  writer Elizabeth Souder has an eagle’s eye and found this really interesting item. Legendary oilman and Barnett Shale fracking expert George Mitchell  has told Forbes that  the federal government should do more to regulate hydraulic fracturing. That’s right, an energy guy calling for more rules on fracking.   And  his reason for more regulation is pretty straightforward:  “Because if they don’t do ...
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Recent Fracking News

Entries from December 18, 2011 - December 24, 2011

Monday
Dec192011

Submit Your Protest Against Relaxation Of Fracking Rules!

Send your letter to to minerals@dnr.state.oh.us by Dec. 23 

By Bernhard Debatin

As detailed in the previous post, the Ohio Department of Natural Resources iscalling for comments on proposed changes to the regulations about fracking. If implemented, the changes will make things considerably easier for the fracking industry without sufficient regard for people’s health, safety, and well-being, and without sufficient protection of the environment.

Here are the four most serious changes in the draft document for the amendments to the Ohio Administrative Code:

Unconventional disposal (dumping) of wastewater In Wetzel County, WV

1. Wastewater Disposal.Fracking companies no longer need to declare how, where, and with whom they’ll dispose their wastewater. This means that there’s no sufficient oversight by ODNR; there isn’t any closed and monitored chain of accountability between the production of the wastewater and its disposal.

2. Property Value. Fracking companies no longer need to provide an independent appraisal or the county auditor’s assessment of all real estate above the twenty-thousand dollar value. Under these rules, it will be up to landowners to obtain costly appraisals. This is an undue cost-shifting onto the landowners and makes it harder for individuals to claim damages to their property value during and after fracking.

3. Saftey Distances. Tanks, fire heaters, and mechanical separators no longer need to be set at a defined safety distance to wells, roads, and inhabited buildings. Given the industry’s record of explosions and fires, this change would be extremely detrimental. Removing the minimal distance is also a complete relinquishment of the very idea of reasonable regulatory action.

4. Time Limits. Most existing limitations (usually 12 months) on permit expiration, operation commencement, and well plugging are lifted or extended, particularly in rural areas. This may result in a reality where people’s health and quality of life are less protected in non-urban areas than in urban ones. Are people in rural areas less important than those in urban areas?

It is appalling that ODNR is relaxing, rather than improving the regulations on fracking.

.................

If you’ do not agree with the proposed changes, send your comments by Dec. 23 to the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management. Please feel free to use the above language to formulate your comments. You may also use and modify a longer draft letter that specifically addresses the changes in detail, which you can download as a Word Document from this site.

Send your letter via email to minerals@dnr.state.oh.us or mail it to this address:

Mineral Resources Management
2045 Morse Rd.
Building H-3
Columbus, OH 43229-6693

 

http://slowdownfracking.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/relaxation-of-fracking-rules/

Monday
Dec192011

New anti-frack group, “Ban Michigan Fracking” organizes

 

Contact: LuAnne Kozma, Ban Michigan Fracking

Email: info@banmichiganfracking.org
Novi, Mich.—A new anti-fracking grassroots activist group, “Ban Michigan Fracking,” organized this week to lead the movement for a statewide ban on fracking for shale or “natural” gas. And fresh from their success in preventing the Delaware River Basin Commission from altering its rules to allow fracking in the headwaters of that mighty river, a host of east-coast and Midwest anti-fracking organizations today welcomed “Ban Michigan Fracking” into the fold.
Ban Michigan Fracking formed to educate, advocate and organize to ban fracking and raise awareness of the dangers of gas drilling to the state’s economy, to the environment and to the health and safety of its people. Ban Michigan Fracking sees as its immediate task the critiquing of current legislation on fracking and water withdrawals that would actually facilitate fracking in the state.
Ban Michigan Fracking spokesperson LuAnne Kozma said, “We have learned from the experience of our sister-organizations in the east that only the total banning of this dangerous process can excite and mobilize people. The halfway measures that pretend to deal with fracking are really designed to fracture our movement and get us bogged down in regulatory detail. We know enough now to demand a ban and we stand with the majority of the informed public in telling our legislators to represent us and not corporate polluters threatening our communities and our way of life.”
Grassroots organizations on the east coast and in the Midwest agreed with that assessment.  Maura Stephens, a co-founder of Coalition to Protect New York, extended a welcome to Ban Michigan Fracking:  “Interstate solidarity and co-operation is the next, necessary level in our struggle against the corporations that would turn our country into a polluted resource colony.” In Pennsylvania, John Detwiler, of the group Marcellus Protest, pointed out “We’re not ‘naïve’ or ‘emotional’, as pro-drilling propaganda paints us:  we see what this industry has already done to other Americans.  Pennsylvania shows why our grassroots movement to ban hydrofracturing is gaining national momentum – we cannot rely on so-called regulation by our state government.”

 

 

Monday
Dec192011

Burton tells state to halt 'fracking'

Burton Village Council called on state officials Monday to halt a gas-well drilling process that is just now making its way into Geauga County.

Council unanimously passed a resolution in support of a moratorium on hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, until the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency finishes a study on the process.

The legislation was introduced in October and came up for a final reading Monday.

"The village of Burton, Ohio, calls on the governor and the Ohio state legislature to place a moratorium (or enact a ban) on hyrdraulic fracturing until an adequate environmental study is completed, showing that hydraulic fracturing can be done safely and without impacting local water supplies within the state," the resolution states.

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