Drill, Baby, Drill

3,300.  That’s how many drilling leases have been issued in Stark County here in Ohio since July 2010.  I don’t know how many were filed before, but 3,300 is a lot of potential drill sites for one county in one year.

I don’t want to bog you down with a bunch of numbers—you should know most of it by now because of the coverage—but this is too important to ignore. Each drill site occupies about a football field—sized area. Each well requires between 1 and 8 million gallons of fluid (half stays in the ground, the other half comes out). Each drill pad can have up to 8 “arms” or separate wells. Each well can be re-fracked up to18 times. Each drill job requires about 500 truckloads just to handle the fracking fluid.

Lots of numbers, I know. But, like I said, this is too important to ignore. Because the oil and gas industry itself and state regulators tell us that it’s true, we know that contamination will happen. But nobody knows just how much contamination. Rep. Renacci recently said that a single accident shouldn't hinder or shut down operations; we need to learn from our mistakes and correct them--you know, I'm not terribly inspired by the "figure it out as we go" approach. 

It’s a matter of tradeoffs. Collateral damage. Some people might get jobs; some landowners will have their ship come in. And the rest of us get to wait, wait for the first report of contaminated water, sick kids, sick animals, or a spill closing down 77S while they wash the crud off into the water fields where many of us reading this get our drinking water. 

When you have 3,300 leases filed in just one year just in Stark County, it’s going to happen. Rep. Hagan recently wrote of Ohio as “an economic force to be reckoned with.” Well, if this is the job creation she’s talking about, I’ll stay dirt poor and keep my water clean. Thank you very much.