Campbell tables negotiating over drilling lease

Staff report

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City officials have tabled negotiating with a company for a lease to drill an injection well in the brownfields, Mayor William VanSuch said Wednesday.

D&L Energy, which owns the brine-injection well on Ohio Works Drive in Youngstown that is suspected of causing 11 earthquakes in the past 10 months, approached the city months ago with a proposal to drill on city-owned property in the old industrial corridor along Wilson Avenue. They were proposing to give the city $20,000 for the right to drill, then said the city could make up to $90,000 a year on the lease.

The 9,000-foot-deep well would accept 105 thousand gallons of waste from hydraulic fracturing fluid a day. Hydraulic fracturing is a drilling method being used in Pennsylvania to extract natural gas from the Marcellus Shale.

There is a moratorium right now on operations at the Ohio Works Drive well, and four inactive wells within a five-mile radius of it must remain inactive.

The city council passed legislation Dec. 7 that would allow negotiations to take place.