Texas-based company approved to frack more than 170 acres of wildlife area in eastern Ohio
A Texas-based company was chosen as the highest and best bid to frack about 170 acres of Leesville Wildlife Area during this month’s Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission meeting.
Grenadier Energy III’s bid was selected among three total bids. The commission is required to pick the “highest and best bid” per Ohio law. The lease bonus is $1,029,840 and includes a 12.5% royalty, according to the Ohio Department of Natural Resources.
Fracking is the process of injecting liquid into the ground at a high pressure to extract oil or gas.
The commission also voted to approve more than a dozen different areas of land to move forward to bidding for fracking. Some of the areas include 4,360 acres in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area, another 366 acres in Egypt Valley Wildlife Area, and 382 acres in Jockey Hollow Wildlife Area.
Public hearing
In a rare move, the commission held a public hearing before their commission meeting on Monday to discuss a new law that ups the term of a standard lease from three years to five years when leasing oil and gas rights.
Ohio House Bill 308 passed at the end of 2024 and went into effect in March 2025.
More than 20 people opposed to extending the fracking leases spoke out for more than an hour about the harmful effects of fracking. No one spoke out in support. People were limited to talking for three minutes and the commissioners had no comments after people offered public comment.
“I think that high-pressure hydraulic fracturing (fracking) under public lands is a bad idea when it applies to a three-year lease for such activity, and it’s a worse idea for five-year leases,” said George Banziger, of Washington County.
“This kind of extractive activity will desecrate our valuable public lands for the current generation and for future generations by polluting air and water, drawing huge amounts of water from the watersheds that serve these public lands, adding service roads and truck traffic, and generating lots of toxic and radioactive waste.”
Ohioans have submitted almost 7,000 public comments asking the the commission to deny nominations to frack public land, said Cathy Cowan Becker, with Save Ohio Parks.
“We don’t know if commissioners even read these comments,” she said.
Becker hopes Ohioans can speak up regarding specific nominations at future meetings.
“We are the people who own and use these public lands,” she said. “We deserve a real voice in what happens to them.”
Peter Maxwell said there is nothing more important to him than the preservation of the quality of water.
“Fracking, or fracturing the Earth’s crust to extract natural gas, has other inadvertent and unavoidable consequences, including earthquakes and contamination of groundwater by the toxic chemicals injected into the voids,” said Maxwell, of Westerville.
Linda New, of the Northeast Ohio Sierra Club, said Ohio’s state parks should be revered and protected by government agencies and officials.
“Fracking under these publicly owned natural areas is unacceptable,” she said. “It’s irresponsible to allow this to happen for three years; extending a lease to five years is unconscionable.”
There were approximately 2,000 incidents associated with oil and gas wells in Ohio from 2015-2023, according to FracTracker Alliance — a nonprofit that collects data on fracking pipelines.
There’s also evidence that shows increased exposure to fracking impacts health, in particular children’s health, including low birth weight, preterm births, congenital anomalies, and asthma, according to Yale School of Medicine.
“We must care for the future of our children and grandchildren,” said Judy Smucker, of Third Act Ohioans. “May they continue to live and enjoy our public lands and parks.”
For the first time, commission Chair Theresa White took questions from the media after the meeting.
“The public comments are one of the factors that are reviewed,” she said when asked about the board doing the opposite of what the public asked the commissioners to do. “It’s not the only factor. So we are considering all of the information that’s presented before us and really trying to weigh all of that information in one consolidated case with either a yes or no answer.”
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