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Columbus
Dispatch...
Cambridge considers
allowing oil drilling in city park
Well’s
revenue would help balance budget, pay for park upkeep
By Josh Jarman
Sunday, March 13, 2011
CAMBRIDGE, Ohio - After 45 years of cutting hair, Ron Lemmon knows the
gossip in his community. Currently, the main issue is oil drilling in
the city’s municipal park.
Lemmon, who operates a barbershop in Cambridge, said drilling for oil
in City Park has been about all his customers have talked about since
Mayor Tom Orr brought the idea before the City Council last month.
The plan would allow a company to operate a well in the middle of the
park, between the ball fields and the park’s covered bridge, and use
the revenue to help balance the city budget and pay for upkeep of park
facilities.
“I haven’t heard anything too much against it,” Lemmon said. “I think,
overall, people are satisfied with the idea that we have to do it.”
He knows some people are against the notion, though. They question the
need to drill for oil where their children play after school. The
debate here comes as state legislators are revisiting opening state
parks to oil and gas exploration, and the reason for doing so at the
state level is the same as it is in Cambridge: money.
Orr said some of the more-aggressive oil companies in the region
approached him years ago about drilling on municipal soil, but he
resisted because he didn’t think it was necessary. One of those
companies, which he would not name, approached him a year ago with an
update: It thinks there is a substantial amount of oil underneath City
Park.
Orr said the company believes that the oil can be retrieved from the
shallower sandstone layers under the park, avoiding the ecological
concerns surrounding oil extraction from the deeper Marcellus and Utica
shale deposits. Because the drilling would be more traditional, the
company has assured Orr that the well would be as unobtrusive as
possible.
He said the oil company has told him the city’s share of the profits
would conservatively be about $1million over 10 to 20 years.
“They believe that’s a worst-case scenario,” Orr said. “I brought it up
now because the company wants to do (the drilling) in the early months
of next year.”
He said that with the down economy continuing to drain the city’s
general fund, city leaders cannot keep returning to the taxpayers to
keep Cambridge afloat. “If there are other opportunities to raise
revenue, we have to look at them,” he said.
Ron Prosek, vice president of the Northeast Ohio Gas Accountability
Project, a nonprofit group that aims to beef up the regulation of oil
and gas drilling in the state, said the siren call of easy money is
hard to resist, but cities need to know what they’re getting into
before signing over mineral rights.
He said that if Cambridge isn’t careful, once the company gets access
to the oil under the city, it can opt for deep-bore, hydraulic drilling
into the lower shale layers unless it’s expressly forbidden in the
lease. He also warned that sweetheart deals from oil companies sound
too good to be true because they often are.
Where Prosek lives, in Mentor in northeastern Ohio, the city had to
threaten to sue to get its signing fees from a company that drilled
near the city garage more than a year ago. Mentor still is waiting to
receive a royalty check from the operation.
Mike McCormick, manager of oil and gas permitting for the state’s
Division of Mineral Resources Management, said that although it’s
uncommon for cities to allow drilling in municipal parks, Cambridge
wouldn’t be the first to do so. Because of the park’s location, north
of downtown in a heavily populated residential area, the oil company
likely believes there’s an untapped pocket of oil at the site because
no other wells are nearby, he said.
Despite oil companies’ finding new ways to drill deeper wells, the
number of wells being drilled in the state declined last year. About
386 productive wells were drilled in the state in 2010, down from more
than 1,025 two years earlier. The state averaged about 700 productive
wells drilled per year in the past decade.
Oil and gas drilling is still big business, however. The state’s 64,378
wells produced just over 4.7million barrels of oil last year at an
average price of $74.42 per barrel, according to a division report
released Thursday.
Not everyone in the city thinks money is a good enough reason to drill
in the park. Brittany Rivers, a University of Mount Union student who
was back home in Cambridge visiting family last week, said the amount
of money being considered is too small to “desecrate the park.”
“I grew up in that park,” she said. “I just don’t feel like it would be
worth the impact.”
Read it at the Columbus Dispatch
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