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Austin Master Services CEO Pays $25,000 Bond to Stay Out of Jail
Last week, MDN exclusively brought you the news that the CEO of American Environmental Services, which owns Austin Master Services (AMS), had filed a brief with Belmont County Court to either forgive or reduce a $1.2 million bond needed to keep the CEO, Brad Domitrovitsch, out of jail (see Austin Master Serv. CEO Asks Court to Block Jail Time, $1.2M Bond). The judge in the case reconsidered and reduced the bond from $1.2 million down to $25,000. Quite the reduction in Domitrovitsch’s “stay out of jail” card.
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This is a case of everybody pointing at somebody else. Natural gas with contaminants (dirty gas) flowed through pipelines to Fairmont State University (in Marion County, WV), which “significantly damaged boilers, gas lines, valved and regulators and other structures and equipment on the college campus” in September 2021. The university sued the local utility company providing the gas, Hope Gas. In return, Hope said that *if* the gas was not clean, it was not their fault. They got the gas from Eastern Gas Transmission and Storage (EGTS), formerly owned by Dominion Energy but now owned by Berkshire Hathaway Energy.
The Bidenistas at the EPA attacked coal and gas-fired power plants in April, threatening to destabilize the existing electric power grid with new regulations (see 
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.
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…
A disappointing (but not surprising) decision from the Democrat leftists on the Pennsylvania Supreme Court was issued last Thursday. The so-called Supremes ruled in favor of allowing three well-financed Big Green groups, including the Sierra Club, PennFuture, and Clean Air Council, to join a lawsuit attempting to force the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI) obscene carbon tax on coal- and gas-fired plants in the Keystone State. Big Green can now participate, bringing along big money and attorneys to support the state Dept. of Environmental Protection (DEP), which is trying to force state participation in RGGI.
In November 2022, all five members of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC), including three Democrats, voted to approve an order allowing the proposed Commonwealth LNG export plant on the Calcasieu River in the Gulf of Mexico near Cameron, Louisiana to get built (see 
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.
EPA Administrator Michael Regan used a considerable amount of fossil energy and emitted tons of carbon dioxide to jet over to Dubai last December to participate in the COP28 confab, where he released a final rule that was “two years in the making” to force the U.S. oil and gas industry to cut methane emissions by using budget-busting new technologies and onerous (frequent) inspections (see 
As we mentioned in a companion post today, the Williams Transco Regional Energy Access Expansion (REAE) project recently received permission from the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to begin operations for another segment of the REAE project, flowing an extra 130 MMcf/d of natural gas to Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Maryland (see FERC OKs Request to Place More of Regional Energy Access Online). However, yesterday, Williams suffered a minor legal setback related to the REAE project.
Yesterday, MDN brought you the news the U.S. Supreme Court rendered a decision that overturned a 40-year-old case establishing the leftist utopian administrative state, colloquially called the Chevron deference case (see 
In January, Joementia announced he would “pause” any approvals for new LNG export plants (currently 17 requests in the pipeline) for at least one year while his people fart around pretending to figure out how to measure global warming as a new consideration for whether or not to approve such projects (see 
Three weeks ago, the owner of Austin Master Services (AMS), American Environmental Partners (AEP), sent a press announcement to MDN to announce he has found a buyer for AMS (see 
Leftists (aka liberals, Communists, socialists, and leaders of the Democrat Party) believe they are smarter than you, they know more than you do, and they should be able to make decisions that affect your life outside of the laws created by duly elected members of Congress. For decades (some 40 years), we in the U.S. have lived under the tyranny of the bureaucratic administrative state following a court decision commonly referred to as the “Chevron deference” case. That case, decided in 1984 (ironic, no?), gave broad powers to federal agencies like the EPA and other executive branch agencies to create, in essence, their own laws (called regulations) without any specific delegation of authority by Congress to do so. It has led to the radical loss of freedom as bureaucratic leftists seized power to enact rules they demand YOU live under. No more! Last Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a case that nullified and threw out the Chevron deference doctrine. This has HUGE implications for the entire oil and gas industry, including the Marcellus/Utica.