I am writing in response to the recent article entitled, “Columbus citizens’ group tours county injection wells.”

The Columbus Community Bill of Rights (CCBR) group is in fact based by an out-of-state fringe extremist environmental national lobbying group, whose efforts in Ohio has failed over 86 percent of the time and has costs communities in Ohio hundreds of thousands of dollars peddling misinformation campaigns, such as the recent Morrow County tour.

The article was not fact-checked by the regulator of the oil and gas industry. Moreover, there has not been one single case of groundwater contamination from injection wells. In fact, underground injection wells are the preferred method of disposal from the U.S. EPA.

There is simply no factual evidence to support claims that the wells are causing contamination to the Columbus watershed and its drinking water. Wastewater is not “dumped” into the watershed as the article stated and in fact the entire process is regulated at both the federal and state levels. To that point, in 2015 the U.S. EPA released a report praising the effectiveness of Ohio’s Class II Underground Injection Control (UIC) regulatory program.

The 34-page report debunks anti-fracking activists who have claimed Ohio’s standards are “profoundly weak” and not protective of public health. EPA concluded that Ohio runs a “good quality program” and highlighted five noteworthy areas where the state received particularly strong remarks.

These include: preventing contamination of drinking water, seismic monitoring, permitting, inspections, and resolving violations. Sadly, the paper’s article highlighted nothing more than propaganda by an out-of-state backed fringe environmental group, who has spent almost a million dollars lobbying and pushing grassroots misinformation “tours” such as the one in Morrow County and did not fact-check any of the talking points made by this agenda-driven group.

— Jackie Stewart,

State Director

Energy In Depth

Canfield, Ohio

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