“The Utica Shale and Ohio: Getting it Right” is a daylong conversation about the who, what, when, where and why of shale oil drilling in our state.
Mike McIntrye, who hosts The Sound of Ideas daily at 9 a.m. on WCPN, welcomed the above speakers onto his show this morning to talk shop. Taken as an aperitif to tomorrow’s bacchanalia, the conversation illuminates a troubling one-sidedness to the issue.
The Network for Oil and Gas Accountability and Protection, a statewide nonprofit, would concur. Their concern lies in the summit’s title: “Getting It Right,” which eludes to a foregone conclusion that widespread hydraulic fracturing (“fracking,” colloquially) and shale oil drilling is an inevitability in Ohio. Environmental activists and advocates for, say, clean drinking water maintain an ongoing fight against the encroachment of that industry.
“The industry’s own data show that they can’t get it right; they can’t prevent well casing failures. They don’t know how to build leak-proof wells. Well casing failures open pathways for gas and other toxins to get into the groundwater. Data from Pennsylvania show that six percent of well casings fail immediately, and 100 percent fail over the lifetime of the well. This demonstrated failure rate will have substantial business and economic impacts for all of Ohio.”
That’s Vanessa Pesec, president of the Network for Oil and Gas Accountability and Protection, with a look to what our neighbor Pennsylvania has experienced.
Nonetheless, Ohio’s own shale oil boom is very much under way. The Ohio Supreme Court ruled last week that the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission may not grant appeals on drilling permits once they are issued. In many ways, a ruling like that paves a golden road to unlimited devotion to shale oil drilling, sure to be focused across Ohio’s easternmost counties.
Afternoon panels at the summit will include:
– How a business gets certified to sell to the shale industry
– Investment opportunities in the Utica Shale
– The balance between the economic benefit of hydraulic fracturing and environmental safety
– The impact this industry is having on Ohio’s workforce
This article appears in Jan 30 – Feb 5, 2013.
Thanks NEOGAP for the distruction of our groundwater for profit…
Special place in hell for you!!!!!!
cbrbart: Your ignorance and lack of reasonable argument is comical. How can you expect to viewed as anything other than an imbecile with comments like that?
CBART – I think you misunderstand; NEOGAP is trying to PREVENT fracking not encourage it.
I listened to the SOI program Monday morning and all the call in questions were from people who were facing health or other probems from fracking in their neighborhoods. No one on the panel was an expert in any of the health or environmental problems that come with fracking so the questions went unanswered. This in itself shows that the program was biased. This is not what we expect from 90.3 and Mike Macintyre. Thank you, Scene, for this coverage of an urgent matter to Ohioans.
Yeah, this whole fracking thing is such a fracking stupid idea. I mean, what the frack are they thinking doing this – it’s our fracking drinking water they’re talking about here. But hey, I guess they figure it won’t matter when they get motherfracking cancer, because they’ll make enough millions of dollars that they can just buy themselves a new body or some stupid fracking idea like that. Fracking needs to be stopped, right fracking now.