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Industry official: ODNR mishandled quake issue
By Karl Henkel
YOUNGSTOWN
An industry official said he’s “frustrated” with the Ohio Department of Natural Resources regarding its handling of the earthquake-brine-injection-well situation in Youngstown.
Tom Stewart, executive vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association, told The Vindicator Monday that ODNR did not move quickly enough in shutting down the D&L Energy Inc. well, but reiterated that injection-well- induced seismic activity is a rarity.
“State government knew that those quakes were happening,” Stewart said. “They essentially knew why the problems were happening and didn’t take, in a timely manner, in my view, the actions necessary to stop that from happening.”
A D&L injection well is suspected of triggering 12 Mahoning Valley earthquakes since last March.
Injection wells are a disposal method for brine, a salty, chemical byproduct of natural-gas and oil drilling.
Stewart, who acknowledged knowing about a potential Youngstown earthquake-brine-injection- well correlation in late summer, said the state’s decision to make D&L plug the bottom 250 feet of its nearly 9,300-foot well was correct, but the enforcement was not made in a timely manner.
“The operator [D&L] was under the view that it was going to happen anyway and was prepared to do it,” Stewart said. “I think they tried for too long to quietly understand it and hope that it would go away.
“All they had to do was plug off 300 feet of well, and we wouldn’t be talking about this today.”
ODNR in November told D&L it would require the company to plug the bottom 250 feet of its well but allowed the company to continue operating until another nearby well was ready to accept brine.
The proposed plugging was a result of deeper-than-necessary drilling, in which D&L delved into the Precambrian formation, the nearly impermeable bedrock that also is the Earth’s crust. Stewart anticipates that in early February, when ODNR will release a full report of its findings along with new restrictions, drilling into the Precambrian no longer will be an option.
That plugging, however, never occurred, and on Dec. 30, a day before a magnitude-4.0 earthquake struck Youngstown but more than nine months after Youngstown’s first earthquake, ODNR and D&L decided to halt well operations.
Rob Nichols, spokesman for Ohio Gov. John Kasich, told The Vindicator earlier this month the state took proper action, which included the banning of five other wells within a 7-mile radius of the Youngstown well until further study is complete.
“If you come in with guns blazing after one earthquake, that’s overreaching,” Nichols said. “That’s overreacting.
“We may take some heat for being seen as overreactive [now]. That’s fine.”
Stewart reinforced the point that most of Ohio’s 176 active injection wells have operated for years without issues.
“This is obviously a very rare example where we encountered a geologic anomaly that nobody knew was there,” Stewart said. “I would feel very confident in saying that if you wanted to duplicate it, you couldn’t duplicate it.”