Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine late Friday signed legislation declaring natural gas a form of “green energy” and requiring state agencies to negotiate with gas and oil developers that want to drill laterally under state properties, including state parks.
The declaration making fossil gas “green” starts by defining green energy as “any energy generated by using an energy resource that does one or more of the following: releases reduced air pollutants, thereby reducing cumulative air emissions, [and] is more sustainable and reliable relative to some fossil fuels.”
The change was among five unrelated amendments inserted in the last days of 2022 into a bill regulating the state’s poultry industry.
H.B. 507 had wide bipartisan support in both the House of Representatives and Senate when introduced and approved months earlier. Democrats withdrew their support of the bill in December when the amendments were added in a Senate committee, immediately approved by Republican majorities in the Senate and sent to the House for the same treatment.
Declaring natural gas green has been a goal of The Empowerment Alliance, an anonymously funded 501(c)(4) nonprofit founded in 2019 with Ohio roots. TEA lobbied state lawmakers, arguing that defining natural gas as green is a way to oppose the Biden administration’s efforts to champion renewable energy technologies while ignoring the gas industry’s role in reducing carbon and other emissions over the last decade by replacing coal. A spokesman said TEA has plans to lobby lawmakers in other states.
In Ohio, TEA has also lobbied county officials in rural counties to declare gas as green. And handful of county commissions adopted such resolutions, though the Ohio Department of Natural Resources (ODNR), not local governments, regulates the oil and gas industry, including permits to drill.
In contrast, changes in state law a year ago reduced the authority of the Ohio Power Siting Board over wind and solar projects by giving county commissioners the final say on every wind and solar project and giving them the authority to declare their county off-limits to any solar and wind development.
A second amendment to H.B. 507, proposed by the Ohio Oil and Gas Association and immediately opposed by environmental groups, requires state agencies to negotiate leases with oil and gas developers that want to drill laterally under state property to access oil and gas.
State agencies have had the authority to negotiate such leases with ODNR’s Oil and Gas Land Management Commission but have never reached an agreement on a specific project.
The amendment does not give oil and gas developers the right to move drilling rigs and shale fracturing equipment onto state land. Ohio shale gas wells typically begin with a vertical well up to 8,000 feet deep before branching into lateral wells drilled 1 to 2 miles through shale rock, which is later fractured with liquids under high pressure, releasing the gas.
In signing H.B. 507, DeWine did not address the issue in the bill’s declaration making fossil gas green. And he downplayed the significance of the language requiring state agencies to negotiate gas and oil leases.
“I believe the amendments in House Bill 507 do not fundamentally change the criteria and processes established by the Ohio General Assembly in 2011 that first established the policy of leasing mineral rights under state parks and lands,” he said in a statement issued at the close of business Friday.
“In addition, I am instructing the director of the Department of Natural Resources to continue to follow the processes first established by the General Assembly in 2011 in this area. This includes continuing my administration’s policy of prohibiting any new surface use access in our state parks.”