The operating record of injection wells
What Ohio’s own history tells us, and why it matters now
This document is not a prediction and not an opinion. It is a record: what has actually happened at injection wells in Ohio and elsewhere, drawn entirely from state regulators, federal agencies, court rulings, peer-reviewed research, and news reporting, all cited at the end.
What is an injection well?
An injection well pumps fluid deep underground for disposal or storage. Federal law sorts them into six classes. The one Ohioans know best is Class II: wells that dispose of the salty, chemical-laden wastewater produced by oil and gas drilling. Ohio has hundreds of active Class II disposal wells, regulated by the ODNR Division of Oil and Gas Resources Management, and decades of operating history to judge them by.
What just happened: July 2026, Washington County
On July 1 and 2, 2026, four Class II injection wells in Washington County ceased operations, voluntarily, by their own operators, after ODNR identified impacts to nearby oil and gas wells from migrating brine waste. ODNR is now hiring a third-party consultant to study private drinking-water wells near the affected area.
01
Not the first warning from that ground
Redbird No. 4 began injecting fracking wastewater in 2018. Within about a year, nearby conventional wells flooded with fluid and dozens stopped producing. A 2020 state investigation confirmed that wastewater from Redbird No. 4 had migrated into the Berea formation, contaminating wells more than five miles away, an estimated 4.2 million gallons of brine that surfaced at 28 different oil wells. Pressure readings in nearby production wells have climbed sharply since 2023, in one case by more than 1,800%. A 2026 citizen-group analysis of state records found that 8 of the county’s 17 injection wells have had serious problems, including blowouts and confirmed migration, and that some impacted wells went two full years without state inspection.
02
The Ohio record: documented incidents
Youngstown
2011
2011
Earthquakes. The Northstar 1 Class II well began operating in an area with no recorded local earthquakes. Over 2011, more than 100 small quakes were recorded near the well, ending in a magnitude 4.0 earthquake on New Year’s Eve, felt into Pennsylvania and Ontario, one day after ODNR obtained a voluntary shutdown. ODNR determined the quakes probably resulted from the well’s operation, created a new seismic monitoring program, and helped lead a 13-state study of man-made earthquakes.
Weathersfield Twp.
2014
2014
Earthquakes, shutdown, 12 years of litigation. ODNR ordered an AWMS Water Solutions injection well closed after two small earthquakes were recorded nearby. The operator fought for compensation for nearly 12 years. In 2026 the Ohio Supreme Court ruled 7–0 that the shutdown was not a compensable taking, writing that the state “did not have to wait to take action to protect the public until a larger, catastrophic seismic event.”
Ashtabula
1987–2001
1987–2001
Earthquakes near a Class I well. Peer-reviewed seismological research attributed a persistent earthquake sequence, including a magnitude 3.8 quake in 1987 and a magnitude 4.3 quake in 2001 that caused slight damage downtown, to fluid injection at a Class I industrial waste well. Some later studies questioned the link; the research record includes both views.
Noble County
2021
2021
Blowout, 13 days of flow, public cleanup cost. A brine release connected to DeepRock injection wells caused a blowout at a nearby production well. Per testimony to the Ohio House, it took 13 days to stop the brine flowing from the well into a nearby creek, and migration in the area had gone on for roughly 12 years before ODNR suspended the injection wells. ODNR paid the cleanup cost of nearly $1.3 million, and sought recovery from the affected well’s owner rather than the injection operator.
Athens County
Suspensions, migration, and an operator who walked away. ODNR shut down injection wells in Athens County after a nearby oil well abruptly stopped producing oil and instead discharged up to 4,200 gallons of brine in 90 minutes, according to the agency’s own suspension order. Testimony submitted to the Ohio House against HB 170 stated that four Class II wells approved between 2012 and 2016 were suspended after brine migration contaminated production wells two to three miles away, that one operator walked away from its operation leaving cleanup to the state, and that 28 chief’s suspension orders for Class II wells appeared in just the 24 months of records posted online.
Community education, not legal advice. · EX-41 · Current as of August 29, 2026.
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Note what this record shows and does not show. It does not show that every injection well fails; most operate without incident. It shows that when wells do fail, the pattern repeats: the damage is discovered by neighbors before regulators; investigations take years; inspections lapse; cleanup and litigation costs land on the public and on nearby well and land owners; and the underground migration, once it happens, cannot be called back.
03
Ohio is not being singled out, and that is not reassuring
Satartia, MS
2020
2020
CO2 pipeline rupture. A Denbury pipeline carrying CO2 ruptured near the village of Satartia, releasing 31,405 barrels. CO2 is heavier than air and displaces oxygen: residents collapsed in homes and vehicles, gasoline engines stalled including emergency vehicles, roughly 200 people were evacuated, and at least 45 were hospitalized with CO2 poisoning and oxygen deprivation. Federal investigators found the operator failed to prepare for ground-movement hazards, failed to notify local emergency responders, and had not modeled where a release could actually travel. PHMSA levied a $2,868,100 penalty and opened a new rulemaking on CO2 pipeline safety. The same operator had another CO2 leak in Sulphur, Louisiana in 2024. This was a pipeline failure, not an injection well failure, but every sequestration project requires both.
Decatur, IL
2024
2024
The nation’s first commercial Class VI well leaked. Archer Daniels Midland’s Decatur facility, the first commercial CO2 sequestration well ever permitted by U.S. EPA under Class VI, built with roughly $281 million in federal funding, was found in 2024 to have allowed CO2 and brine to migrate into unauthorized underground zones through a corroded monitoring well. EPA issued a Notice of Violation, alleging ADM also failed to monitor as its permit required and failed to follow its own emergency response plan. A second suspected leak paused injection entirely. EPA stated drinking water was not threatened. The significance is simple: the flagship project, operating under the strictest well class that exists, with federal money and federal oversight, still leaked, and the failure was found in the monitoring system itself.
04
It has been stopped before in Ohio: Darke County, 2009
Carbon injection has already come to an Ohio county, and left. In 2008 and 2009, the Battelle-managed Midwest Regional Carbon Sequestration Partnership proposed a $92.8 million demonstration project to inject one million tons of CO2 from an ethanol plant in Greenville into the Mt. Simon Sandstone more than 3,000 feet down, with $61 million in federal funding. Residents organized for roughly 14 months. Local officials and both of the county’s Republican state representatives publicly opposed the project, citing unanswered questions about seismic risk, groundwater, and property values; a local poll reported 90% opposition. On August 19, 2009, Battelle announced Greenville was no longer under consideration, citing “business considerations.”
The lesson is not that opposition always wins. It is that informed, organized communities, asking specific technical and legal questions, early, with their local officials alongside them, have changed the outcome before, in this state, on this exact technology.
05
Now a new class of well is coming to Ohio
Class VI wells inject carbon dioxide underground for permanent storage. Ohio has never had one. Nationally, as of early 2026, only four federally permitted Class VI wells were operating, in Illinois and Indiana, with roughly eleven state-permitted wells elsewhere, and one of those few is the Decatur flagship described above. Ohio House Bill 170, signed June 24, 2026 and effective September 23, 2026, creates the state’s first carbon-storage framework and places it under the same agency whose Class II record fills this page. The implementing regulations have not yet been adopted.
One more Ohio-specific consideration, offered with attribution: expert testimony submitted against HB 170 by an environmental chemist cites a peer-reviewed analysis finding that predicted CO2 plume footprints in Ohio and Pennsylvania sandstones range from 4,500 to 11,000 square kilometers, versus roughly 300 to 320 square kilometers in the thicker storage formations of Illinois and Texas, because the local rock is thinner and less absorbent. The same testimony notes southeastern Ohio’s thousands of orphan wells, fracking wells, and old mines as potential leakage pathways. If that analysis is correct, storage plumes in Ohio would be far larger, touching far more landowners, than the projects Ohioans have seen described elsewhere.
Class VI wells will operate under stricter federal standards than Class II. The questions the Class II record raises are not about standards on paper.
They are about inspection frequency, detection speed, who discovers the problem first, who pays when something goes wrong, and what happens underground over decades. On those questions, Ohio’s own operating history is the best evidence available, and it counsels attention, not panic, and scrutiny, not trust.
Not legal advice and not a scientific study. A citizen-prepared reference compiled from public sources, using only documented incidents. Sources: Farm and Dairy (Jul 2026) · WTAP News (Jul 8, 2026) · Marietta Times / News and Sentinel (Jul 2026) · Signal Ohio (Nov 2025) · ODNR Preliminary Report on the Northstar 1 Class II Injection Well (Mar 2012) · Kim, J. Geophys. Res. (2013) · The Business Journal (Jul 7, 2026) · Seeber & Armbruster, Bull. Seismol. Soc. Am. 94(1) (2004) · The Ohio Newsroom/WOSU (Jan 2026) · Groff and Pokladnik opponent testimony on H.B. 170, Ohio House (2025) · PHMSA (May 26, 2022) · Pipeline Safety Trust (2023, 2024) · U.S. EPA Region 5 NOV to ADM (Aug 14, 2024) and final compliance order (2025) · CRS R48033 · Dayton Daily News (Aug 21, 2009) · IEEE Spectrum (2009) · Ohio LSC Bill Analysis, H.B. 170 (Oct 27, 2025).
May be freely copied and shared.
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