Last July, a short notice appeared in the back of the Marietta Times.
“DeepRock Disposal Solutions, LLC… is applying to permit a well for the injection of brine water produced in association with oil and natural gas,” the clip read.
At the time, injection wells weren’t on Susan Vessels’ radar.
“But it sounded like something that I ought to learn about,” the Marietta City Council president said.
So she hosted a big public meeting and invited everyone from public officials to DeepRock representatives to petroleum engineers and PhD geologists.
What she learned alarmed her.
“They're literally putting these wells almost on top of one another,” she said. “And to have seven wells just outside of our city injecting up to 35,000 barrels a day, it doesn't take a PhD to know that ultimately that's not going to turn out well for our community.”
Vessels isn’t alone. Across southeast Ohio’s Washington County, community members are concerned that wastewater stored in injection wells could contaminate the local water supply.
“It might not be tomorrow. It might not be next year. It might not be three years [from now]. It might be 10 years, but do we want this for our children?” said Dee Wells Arnold, a member of the community organization Washington County for Safe Drinking Water.
Her family has lived in the area since before the Civil War, and she points to the city’s historical significance as the first European settlement of the Northwest Territory. She says outsiders may not realize just how precious the city is.
“We have more Revolutionary War heroes buried in Mound Cemetery than any place in the United States,” she said. “I just feel like we have a lot to fight for here.”
“A plea for help”
In August, Vessels and a bipartisan group of nine other elected officials filed an objection letter to DeepRock’s application, expressing serious concerns for the safety of the city’s drinking water. They asked the Division of Oil and Gas to deny the permit and hold a public meeting on the matter.
The Ohio Department of Natural Resources’ division did neither.
The ODNR declined a request for an interview with The Ohio Newsroom. In an email, a spokesperson cited pending litigation and said they wouldn’t comment on the approval the well or the refusal to hold a public meeting.
But the department did send the city two Q&A-style responses to their concerns last year. In those documents, the department said injection wells are designed to protect underground sources of drinking water and that there’s no law limiting the number of injection wells within a geographic area.
Marietta’s city council wasn’t reassured. They passed a series of resolutions, including one asking the state for a three-year moratorium on injection well activity within Washington County, to give experts time to study the area’s geology.
“The council agrees that we have too many wells injecting too much too close to our aquifers,” Vessels said. “So it's a plea for help, essentially, that we need to change how things are being done.”
She says the city has received little response from the state since.
“To me, personally, it's shocking,” she said. “I always felt that the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, the EPA – I felt that they were almost, perhaps even doing too much to protect us. And having delved into this over the last four months, I'm learning that that isn't the case.”
A lawsuit against the ODNR
In November, the Buckeye Environmental Network – a grassroots environmental justice group – sued the ODNR and its oil and gas division. They say the state broke the law last year when it used old rules to approve two injection wells near Marietta proposed by DeepRock, even though new rules went into effect in 2022.
“The ODNR is obligated to follow the Federal Clean Drinking Water Act and to uphold the current state rules that they themselves wrote and the legislature passed into law for a reason,” said Bev Reed, an Appalachian organizer for the network, in a press release. “They didn't do that when permitting these wells, so we're holding them to account.”
She wants the department to be more proactive when it comes to protecting the safety of local drinking water.
“They're not protecting us as Ohio citizens,” she said. “They're just not.”
In its Q&A response to the city, the ODNR said it used the old rules because it received DeepRock’s application in 2021, before the new rules went into effect.
DeepRock Disposal Solutions didn’t respond to a request for comment. But they passed my number on to Matt Dole, a consultant for the Accountability Project Institute, a 501(c)(4) nonprofit with undisclosed donors that has previously run ads against Ohio Democrats.
He says Marietta City Council’s attempt to regulate injection wells based on the possibility they could contaminate drinking water is unnecessary and an example of government overreach.
“A lot of things could happen,” Dole said. “I could get hit by lightning tomorrow, but the government has chosen to not regulate my ability to go out in a rainstorm because it is so unlikely that regulation would be overkill in that circumstance. And the same is true with injection wells.”
He sees the city council’s efforts as part of a bigger environmental movement.
“Truly, we believe that this is an attempt by the environmental lobby to oppose oil and gas,” he said. “No, they can't win that battle, but if they win a battle against injection wells, they shut down the oil and gas industry.”
Vessels and Wells Arnold say that’s not the case.
“We just want a common sense approach to what is happening here or else we could lose a lot,” Wells Arnold said. “This is a sacred, sacred area and maybe the people in Columbus, they don't understand what's here. They don’t understand the history.”
For now, she and many of her neighbors are waiting to see how the Buckeye Environmental Network’s lawsuit plays out. But even if the group wins and DeepRock has to comply with newer, stricter rules, it’s still up to the ODNR to decide how many future injection wells to permit in the county.
