Setting the Record Straight on Ohio’s “2,529 Oil & Gas Incidents”

Big Green group FracTracker Alliance, with partner Buckeye Environmental Network (BEN), has released a new report claiming Ohio logged 2,529 oil and gas “incidents” from 2015 through 2025, and that incidents are “rising” while oversight is “lax.” The Ohio Capital Journal ran with the big number without checking it. But here’s the thing: if you actually read FracTracker’s own charts (we did, all 31 pages), they tell a very different story. Shale wells account for less than 8% of the incidents. Serious incidents fell more than 80%. And the “rise” is almost entirely in records that state regulators didn’t even rate as “minor.” Let’s set the record straight…

NOTE: This full article is free for everyone to read; no subscription or registration required. Share the link so others learn the truth.

What the Report Claims

The report, “Rising Incidents, Lax Oversight” (full copy below), is written by FracTracker’s Gwen Klenke. It’s built on Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR) incident records obtained through public records requests. The headline numbers: 2,529 incidents over 11 years, rising from 103 in 2015 to 268 in 2025, and roughly 25 ODNR inspectors covering about 96,000 active wells. The report complains that ODNR’s incident categories are fuzzy, that some incidents labeled “minor” weren’t so minor, that some records stay open for years, and that ODNR rarely issues fines. It wants more inspectors, fines for long-running violations, and an immediate stop-work order for any violation or contamination event. The project began after the Ohio Oil and Gas Association’s president said publicly in 2023 that Ohio had seen only one or two incidents affecting public health and safety in the prior decade.

Shale Is a Sliver of This

The report admits, without putting it in the headline, that “a large majority of incidents occur at ‘conventional’ wells.” Here are its own figures (Figure 3):

• 1,309 incidents (52%) at conventional wells, the old shallow vertical wells Ohio has been drilling for over a century
• 197 incidents (7.8%) at horizontal wells, meaning Utica/Point Pleasant shale wells
• 619 incidents (24.5%) with no activity listed, listed as “not applicable,” or “undetermined”

That works out to about 18 shale-well incidents a year. FracTracker’s own website counts 3,878 drilled horizontal wells in Ohio as of September 2025.

The report spends nearly two pages arguing that “conventional” doesn’t mean “safer.” That’s a convenient argument when your data shows that the modern shale industry isn’t where the problems are.

Serious Incidents Are Way Down

ODNR rates incidents on a five-step scale. According to FracTracker’s Figure 5, moderate, major, and severe incidents dropped from 33 in 2015 to 6 in 2025. That’s a decline of about 82%. Over all 11 years, those three categories add up to 104 incidents. That’s 4.1% of the 2,529 total.

So Where Is the “Rise” Coming From?

We subtracted the “minor” and “moderate-or-worse” counts from each year’s total (see our chart). What’s left is records ODNR didn’t rate even “minor”: things like “information only,” “agency assist,” and “agency referral.”

• 2015: 1 such record. 2016: 56. 2025: 135. Over 11 years: 1,063 records, or 42% of the total.
• “Minor” incidents actually went down, from 137 in 2016 to 127 in 2025.

Nearly all of the increase comes from the least serious bucket. Going from 1 record to 56 in a single year looks a lot more like a change in ODNR’s record-keeping than a change in what happened in the oilfield.

What Counts as an “Incident”?

Just about anything, as it turns out. The list includes 40 “gas outage/interruption” records and 61 “complaints.” One of the report’s featured “major” incidents involves a property owner who drained a tank into a river from an unregistered well. Another involves a tank explosion caused by static electricity from overhead power lines. Another happened while a well was being plugged under the state’s orphan well program. And according to FracTracker’s own Figure 7, 1,007 incidents (40%) were closed the same day and 61% within a week.

How the Media Ran With It

The Ohio Capital Journal’s Megan Henry wrote up the report on Oct. 29. To be fair to her, she asked ODNR for comment (it didn’t respond by deadline). She also printed a reply from the Ohio Oil and Gas Association’s Mike Chadsey, who called FracTracker’s conclusions advocacy, not a real assessment. But getting a quote from each side isn’t the same as checking the numbers. The story repeated the 2,529 total and the “generally increasing” trend just as FracTracker served them up. It never mentioned that shale wells made up less than 8% of incidents, or that serious incidents fell from 33 to 6. Both facts were sitting right there in the report’s own charts.

Instead, readers got Klenke telling residents of Stark, Noble, Trumbull, and Guernsey counties to be “especially vigilant when they are doing things like going on hikes.” On a hike? Really? Klenke also told the paper that 2,500 incidents feel like far more than there should be. Spread across the report’s own count of 96,000 wells, that’s about 230 records a year, or roughly one per year for every 420 wells. And some of those records weren’t at a well at all. Nobody asked her to compare that to anything.

Here is the full Ohio Capital Journal article (allowed under a Creative Commons license) trumpeting the study:

…

Where FracTracker Has a Point

To be fair: 486 incidents took more than a month to close, and 249 records still have no closure date. Also, 25 inspectors for roughly 96,000 wells (nearly all of them conventional) is thin. The brine migration problems from Class II injection wells in southeast Ohio, including DeepRock’s Noble County wells and the Redbird #4 well, are real. MDN has covered them. But those are wastewater disposal issues. They aren’t shale drilling issues.

The FrackTracker Alliance Report:

…

MDN’s Take

FracTracker didn’t make up any numbers. They’re ODNR’s numbers. What FracTracker did do was to take a report showing serious incidents falling by more than 80%, with shale wells responsible for less than one in 12 incidents, and slap “Rising Incidents” on the cover. Then reporters repeated the 2,529 figure without asking the obvious question: 2,529 what? A gas outage call, a complaint, a landowner draining his own tank, an orphan well the state was plugging — all of it gets counted. Counting every single entry in a database isn’t analysis. It’s padding.

Ohio’s Utica drillers have built a strong record, and FracTracker’s own report proves it. Want to fix something? Go after the injection well brine migration issue, and ask Columbus to hire more inspectors for the tens of thousands of old conventional wells. We’d back both. But demanding a stop-work order for every violation, including paperwork violations? That’s not oversight. That’s a shutdown strategy, and it’s what FracTracker has been after all along. BUSTED.