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In the far reaches of Appalachian Ohio, DeepRock Disposal Solutions and other companies pump salty, hazardous waste from oil and gas fracking thousands of feet underground at high pressure. Last year, the state gave DeepRock permits to drill two more injection wells for pumping such waste underground. The new wells are slated for rural Washington County, which sits on Ohio’s southeast border.
The state’s approval has drawn fierce opposition from surrounding community members and local governments that fear waste from the wells could escape and pollute their drinking water supply. Leaks have happened before, including from some DeepRock wells. But these opponents haven’t been able to stop the company’s latest drilling plans.
This lack of local authority highlights an unfair discrepancy in Ohio, according to legal experts and clean energy advocates: While state law allows counties, townships, and disgruntled residents’ groups to delay or even doom many solar and wind developments, it blocks almost all local decision-making power over fossil fuel endeavors.
The difference between how Ohio law deals with renewables and petroleum “is night and day,” said Heidi Gorovitz Robertson, a professor at Cleveland State University College of Law.
On one hand, state law gives the Ohio Department of Natural Resources “sole and exclusive authority” to permit oil and gas activities. “So the local governments are cut out entirely,” Robertson explained, noting a 2015 Ohio Supreme Court decision that held that the state’s comprehensive regulation of oil and gas activities preempts even city zoning ordinances that would otherwise restrict that work.
On the other hand, a 2021 law lets counties ban new solar and wind development for most of their territory. Even for “grandfathered” projects that are technically exempt from such bans, the Ohio Power Siting Board has used opposition from local governments as grounds for finding such developments were not in the “public interest.”
“What you have looks like total inconsistency” when it comes to deciding which energy projects should go where, Robertson said.
That has serious implications for the energy transition: It holds back the projects that would slash planet-warming and health-harming pollution while further entrenching the lead that the oil and gas industry has in Ohio’s electricity sector.
Ohio also treats renewables differently than it does fossil fuel projects when it comes to letting the community participate in permitting decisions. The state lets disgruntled residents intervene as official parties in wind- and solar-permitting cases, which allows those individuals to appeal permit approvals to the Ohio Supreme Court. Yet residents cannot intervene or appeal in cases about where oil and gas activities go.
Advocacy groups such as the Buckeye Environmental Network say this imbalance is making communities like Washington County, where DeepRock plans to inject more fracking waste, less safe.
Fracking — a drilling technique to extract fossil fuels from rocks thousands of feet deep — produces millions of barrels of waste per year. Regular wastewater treatment plants can’t handle those super-salty fluids, which can contain heavy metals, radioactive chemicals, and company “trade secret” compounds. That’s why the waste is typically disposed of in deep wells.
Ohio had more than 200 active fracking-waste injection wells as of late 2024, with several already in Washington County.
Marietta, a city of about 13,000 on the Ohio River, abuts Warren Township, where DeepRock will drill the new wells. The city’s leaders worry that the waste could migrate out of the rock layer where it will be stored. A 2019 investigation found that waste had escaped from another injection well in Washington County, although it wasn’t discovered in drinking water at that time.
The Marietta City Council passed a resolution in October that noted problems with waste escaping from other wells, and it urged the state to place a moratorium on disposing of more fracking waste in the area. The city also tried to appeal one of DeepRock’s permits, but the Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management at the Department of Natural Resources responded that its Oil and Gas Commission, which reviews those administrative appeals, lacks jurisdiction for Marietta’s claims.
“People are saying we don’t want these injection wells,” said Roxanne Groff, an advisory board member of the Buckeye Environmental Network. “And the main reason is the water.”
Groff’s group is taking another approach to stopping the DeepRock project: It’s suing leaders at the Ohio Department of Natural Resources over the permits issued for the wells. The lawsuit, filed in November, argues the agency illegally relied on outdated regulations that were in effect when DeepRock first filed for its permits but that were replaced in 2022 by stricter rules meant to better protect public safety and health.
“The law is very clear in our view that [the department] should be applying the rules in place at the time of permitting,” said James Yskamp, a senior attorney at the nonprofit Earthjustice, which is representing the Buckeye Environmental Network. When DeepRock applied for its permits in late 2021, the current siting rules were already in draft form, and the public comment period on them had ended. Moreover, the agency didn’t complete technical reviews, provide public notice about the permits, or accept comments on them until last year.
Karina Cheung, a spokesperson for the Department of Natural Resources, said her agency has no comment on pending litigation. But she did note that any permit to operate the wells after they’re drilled will need to comply with current rules in the Ohio Administrative Code. That permit would control how the company pumps waste underground under pressure, but not where that waste goes. And the wells would already have been drilled.
Lawyers for the officials at the Department of Natural Resources and for DeepRock want the case dismissed. The department had no duty to apply the current law, the filings claim. And any harm is speculative, they argue, because it wouldn’t happen until after fracking waste is pumped down.
The Buckeye Environmental Network’s petition before the Franklin County Court of Appeals indicates the two DeepRock wells are approximately 2 miles from protected groundwater resources for people in the city of Marietta and Warren Township. Already-operating wells in the area pump tens of thousands of gallons of fracking waste underground each day. Injecting yet more fluids under high pressure could cause waste to migrate out of deep rock layers and up through rock fissures, abandoned wells, or other conduits, the group alleges.
These concerns are founded on evidence, Groff noted, unlike people’s objections to solar projects, which she said tend to be lacking in factual support or based on false information.
Robertson at Cleveland State has the numbers to back up that claim: She analyzed the grounds for testimony against a utility-scale solar project in a permitting case in 2024. Most objections either had no basis in fact or had already been addressed by permit conditions. The rest were statements of opinion.
To the extent there is any consistency in how Ohio treats different types of energy projects, “it’s that the oil and gas industry wins every time,” Robertson said. “The oil and gas industry benefits by blocking local voices in oil and gas industry decisions. And the oil and gas industry benefits by having local voices involved in the wind- and solar-energy decision-making.”
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