Small Group Protests at Young Expo, Well Site
GIRARD, Ohio – A few miles away from where the oil and gas industry gathered for a regional conference, a small group of activists opposed to the hydraulic fracturing used to extract the minerals from the ground staged a protest at the site of a well that had been intended to be used for disposal of the chemicals used in the process.
A statewide moratorium on new applications for injection wells, which are used to dispose of the brine or wastewater used in the hydraulic fracturing process, was lifted a few weeks ago, reported Susie Beiersdorfer of Frackfree Mahoning Valley. “There are now 29 pending applications in various stages of going through the permitting process,” she said.
Beieresdorfer joined eight other activists to stage a short protest across Route 422 from the site of a D&L Energy injection well that had been under construction until late last year. The moratorium was put in place following a 4.0 magnitude earthquake that shook the Youngstown area Dec. 31, one in a series of quakes occurring over several months. Another D&L well in Youngstown has been linked to the quakes.
“We still don’t know the underground geology,” Beiersdorfer said. The Dec. 31 quake was “definitely a rare occurrence but that doesn’t mean that they can’t occur again,” she said. “Just because you shut down a well does not mean that the quakes won’t occur after.” She is concerned that there are “hundreds of thousands of barrels of toxic waste” waiting to be shipped to area injection wells from Pennsylvania.
The activists staged the protest to take place the first day of the Youngstown Ohio Utica & Natural Gas 2012 Conference & Expo taking place at Youngstown’s Covelli Centre.
“I am worried about the whole process. There’s not safety technology in place,” Beiersdorfer said. “The drilling companies are not investing in that. … We either have weak regulations or no regulations to deal with this influx of drilling.”
Unlike last year’s Young conference, when there was an educational session open to the general public, “This year the public wasn’t invited,” Beiersdorfer remarked. “We’re saving our strength. We don’t want to trespass.”
“To me it was interesting that the public was not invited,” said Jeanne Tucker, Mineral Ridge. “Are they afraid of us?”
One of the Frackfree protestors, John Williams of McDonald, joined two of his associates earlier in the day on the sidewalk in front of the Covelli Centre to distribute coupon-style handouts as attendees headed into the conference.
“I’m out here to let the people know that some of us aren’t going to stand idly by and let them destroy our water, land and air,” he said at the downtown protest. The three protesters at the Covelli Centre was in stark contrast to the hundreds who marched through downtown in November when the first Young expo took place.
Beiersdorfer says she isn't concerned that the issue is falling off people's radar. "I'm seeing more people being educated and more people being woken up," she said.
Attorney Jim Denney, whose office is across from the Route 422 D&L site, said he doesn’t have a problem with the well. He said he was notified over a year ago when it was going to be installed.
“As long as the wells are done according to regulations and they follow all the government regulations I really don’t have a problem,” he said. “Something has to be done with the waste – the water, the brine, whatever it is they pull out of those fracking wells – and this is one of the ways they dispose of it.”
Most people don’t have an issue with it, he continued, and pointed out that several of the protestors who have been arrested were from out of town.
Copyright 2012 The Business Journal, Youngstown, Ohio.