Flurry of Activity at Austin Master Services Site in Martins Ferry
Yesterday, the Ohio Dept. of Natural Resources (ODNR) opened up the shuttered Austin Master Services (AMS) radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, to begin cleanup work at the facility. One contractor began working at the site, while a bunch of others did a “pre-bid walkthrough” to look at what is there to make bids for cleaning it. AMS is permitted by the ODNR to temporarily store up to 600 tons of fracking waste, like drill cuttings and wastewater. ODNR estimates there are some 10,000 tons of fracking waste at the site. AMS ran out of money, and vendors quit accepting the waste. After failing to meet a court-ordered July 22 deadline, ODNR stepped in to handle the cleanup.
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As we have been reporting, Austin Master Services, a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio, that handles fracking waste (trucks it for disposal), ran into trouble when it ran out of money. The facility where waste is temporarily stored went from a permitted maximum of 600 tons of stored waste to over 10,000 tons, in violation of its permit. The Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a lawsuit against the company to force compliance. As is always the case, there are two sides to every story. The side of AMS and its owner, Brad Domitrovitsch, is not getting much media coverage. We have an update on Brad’s side of the story…
In November 2018, under intense pressure from activist investors, EQT split itself into two companies: EQT Corporation and Equitrans Midstream (see
Austin Master Services (AMS) is a radiological waste management solutions company in Martins Ferry (Belmont County), Ohio. The Ohio Attorney General lodged charges against AMS in March, accusing the company of storing 16+ times more drill cuttings at the facility than it’s rated for (see
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According to Public News Service (PNS), a Big Green propaganda outfit funded (in part) by the Fresh Water Accountability Project, the CEO of Austin Master Services (AMS), a frack waste storage facility in Martin’s Ferry, Ohio, was supposed to attend a Belmont County court hearing by phone. He faces contempt-of-court charges for failing to clean up 10,000 tons of waste. However, it wasn’t the hearing that caught our attention; it was a comment made by the Mayor of Martins Ferry.
Over the past seven-plus years, BKV Corporation (Banpu Kalnin Ventures), the American arm of Banpu (96% owned by Banpu, Thailand’s largest coal mining company), has become one of the top 20 gas-weighted natural gas producers in the U.S. BKV originally entered the American shale sector by investing $500 million in 2016-2017 to buy existing Marcellus wells and acreage in northeast Pennsylvania. Then the company went wandering into other shale plays (see
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Mergers and Acquisitions (M&A) have been all the rage over the past year or so. In 2024 alone, Chesapeake Energy announced a $7.4 billion deal to buy Southwestern Energy (see