The Warren Community Water and Sewer Association held a public meeting with Buckeye Environmental Network to discuss concerns of brine waste migrating into gas and water wells in Washington County, Ohio on July 15, 2025. (Liz Partsch photo)MARIETTA, Ohio — Bob Lane drives through the steep hills of Athens County, pointing to access roads where his gas wells are. These conventional wells and others nearby have been producing gas for him and other property owners for decades. But today, these wells are no longer producing gas. Instead, they contain fracking wastewater.
Fracking wastewater, known as brine waste, is a byproduct of unconventional oil and gas drilling. It is stored in Class II injection wells as a way to isolate the fluid from getting into the environment, reports the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
Brine contains heavy metals and radioactive substances that can damage the environment and public health if it leaks into water or onto land, according to the EPA. Incidentally, brine waste has migrated out of these wells into conventional gas wells around Marietta, Ohio.
Lane and Bob Wilson, owner of Wilson Energy LLC., have been fighting for six years to get the wastewater out of their wells, filing a lawsuit against injection well companies in 2019. But since then, little has been done, and now more landowners in Washington and Athens counties are finding that distinct brine stench wafting up from their gas wells.
Residents are also becoming concerned that the migration of brine waste into gas wells could contaminate municipal water sources. The Warren Community Water and Sewer Association, a water service provider servicing 2,500 homes and businesses in Marietta, held a public meeting on July 15 at Warren High School to address these concerns.
“Bob Wilson and I would probably end up giving all of our wells away if we could find somebody to take them,” Lane said. “But it’s our farmland and (could be) everything else in the area if this continues.”
Barrels of brine
As of 2024, there were 17 injection wells in Washington County, according to ODNR. Washington County is tied for second-most injection wells per county in Ohio after Trumbull County, with 19, said Karina Cheung, spokesperson for the Ohio Department of Natural Resources — the regulatory body responsible for these wells. In 2023, 5.9 million barrels of brine were injected into wells in Washington County.
Ohio accepts brine waste from a number of states, including Pennsylvania and West Virginia. As of 2025, Ohio has 232 active injection wells — more than its two neighboring states combined.
Ohio accepted 11,212,266 barrels of brine waste from other states in 2024, and, in total, 32,936,244 barrels of this wastewater were injected into injection wells in the state last year, according to Cheung. She notes these numbers could be higher, as companies are still sending in their 2024 reports.
Lane believes injection wells are leaking because the state is accepting and injecting too much brine waste.
He also questions why other states do not want this brine waste: “If it has no effect on drinking water or anything else, why in the world are they hauling it over 100 miles from up in Pennsylvania, clear down here to Washington County? Why don’t they drill disposal (injection) wells up there and put it in the ground up there?”
Brine in wells
Lane, owner of Bob Lane’s Welding Inc., grew up on a beef farm and orchard in Marietta, Ohio. He invested in his first gas well with a friend in 1978. In the mid ’80s, he bought 72 more wells out of a bankruptcy court in Columbus.
Wilson has worked in the oil and gas industry since he was 15 years old. “That’s all I’ve ever done,” he said. He has worked in all sectors of the oil and gas industry, from drilling wells and laying pipelines to wellhead production and now owning them.
Wilson has owned his own gas wells since 2000. But in 2019, he started noticing water in his gas wells, something that has halted his ability to produce gas. Wilson approached Lane, who also owned wells nearby, about the issue.
Wilson and Lane reached out to ODNR about the problem, but according to Wilson, the agency didn’t believe it could be brine waste. Lane then reached out to then-Ohio state Rep. Jay Edwards, who visited the well sites and put pressure on the ODNR to investigate the issue.
Later that year, an ODNR inspector took samples from 15 of Lane and Wilson’s wells. The results, released in June 2020, found that brine waste had migrated from the nearby Redbird #4 injection well into 28 gas production wells.
According to the report, the Ohio Shale Formation, where the Redbird #4 injection well is located, has a low permeability, meaning that with a high enough amount of pressure, this fluid can escape its intended storage space.
In July 2021, ODNR later concluded from a study that water wells within a one-half-mile radius did not have brine waste contamination.
As of May 2020, Redbird #4 injection well stopped injecting into the Ohio Shale Formation, but has continued injection operations into a deeper formation, the Bass Islands/Salina Group injection zones, reports ODNR.
One of Bob Lane’s gas wells from afar in Marietta, Ohio on July 15, 2025. (Liz Partsch photo)
Wilson and Lane filed a lawsuit in 2019 against several injection well companies, including Tallgrass Energy Company and Deeprock Disposal Solutions, and named Deeprock’s former CEO Brian Chavez, now an Ohio state senator and chair of the state’s energy committee.
But, six years later, Lane and Wilson have yet to see their day in court. The lawsuit has been appealed twice, most recently by Tallgrass in the Ohio Supreme Court, said Lane. Meanwhile, Wilson and Lane are continuing to see their wells flooded. Wilson lost another well to brine waste just a month ago, and another is on the way, he said.
Today, Wilson, who owns 170 gas wells in Washington County, Ohio, has had 45 of these wells flooded. Lane, who owns 65 wells, has had eight flooded with brine water.
But now, Lane and Wilson aren’t the only ones seeing brine waste in their wells. Gas well owners Jack Chamberlain and Joe Wigal recently reported their wells in Marietta, Ohio, to have what they suspect is brine waste from nearby injection wells, reports the Buckeye Environmental Network.
Chamberlain’s gas well hadn’t been producing for years, when suddenly he discovered his well full of water. Meanwhile, Wigal and his family have relied upon their domestic gas well for generations to heat their home; now, Wigal is unsure what to do.
“The biggest problem is this was our only sole form of gas, this is heating the home and, you know, it comes down to ‘Are we going to cook things tonight?’ or ‘Are we going to take a hot shower?’ because it’s a gas hot water tank and gas stove,” Wigal told Buckeye Environmental Network.
This video was produced by Buckeye Environmental Network. Learn more at info@benohio.org, and find Buckeye Environmental Network’s YouTube channel here.
The meeting
As more gas well owners continue to see brine water filling their wells, Marietta residents and those in surrounding areas are concerned that this brine water could migrate into local water sources like Warren Township’s and the city of Marietta’s wells.
PFOA, a per- and polyfluoroalkyl substance (PFAS) known as a forever chemical, was recently found in Warren Township’s water wells, according to Warren Community Water and Sewer Association’s Drinking Water Consumer Confidence Report for 2024.
A spokesperson for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency told Farm and Dairy that it cannot conclude the source of the PFOA contamination but that Warren Community Water is working with an engineer to remove the PFAS, and this plan is currently under review by the agency.
This is not the first time Ohio residents have had concerns about brine waste getting into drinking water.
In April 2024, the Ohio Oil and Gas Commission ruled that K&H Partners must suspend operations at three of its injection wells in Athens County after ODNR identified that the wells were leaking, and brine fluid was migrating underground, posing a threat to Athens County’s water sources.
The Warren Community Water and Sewer Association recently held a meeting, hosted in conjunction with Buckeye Environmental Network, that brought together residents, environmental advocates and local water officials to address concerns about brine waste contaminating local water sources. It was a follow-up to a meeting held in May with residents concerning injection wells.
The association also met with the state in June about the threats brine waste could have on drinking water, said Randy Beardsley, a member of the association’s board of trustees, at the meeting. Government officials said well operators are following the state’s rules for injection wells. New, stricter rules would be necessary to fix the problem of brine migration, said Beardsley.
Many speakers at the meeting emphasized the need for residents and landowners to speak up, especially those with gas wells flooded with potential brine waste.
“Silence is acceptance,” said Steve Hutchinson, member of the Warren Community Water and Sewer Association’s board of trustees, at the meeting. “What I mean by that is, everyone in this room, if you want things to change, we need each and every person in here to contact ODNR.”
The impacts
At the meeting, Beverly Reed, a member of the Buckeye Environmental Network, also discussed the impacts that brine migration has had on landowners with gas wells.
“Folks depend on these wells for heat, for energy, for their homes, and they’re losing that,” Reed said. Lane mentioned that at many of the properties where he drilled wells, landowners were previously using wood or propane to heat their homes.
“The thing that they valued most was heating their house in the winter and not having to cut firewood anymore,” Lane said.
Reed also mentioned landowners are now faced with the financial burden of connecting to a natural gas line and plugging their wells.
Wilson is concerned that he will be tasked with pumping out and disposing of the brine waste and, later on, having to plug the wells. He added he did not cause this problem, and those responsible for it should pay for the cleanup.
Lane emphasized that he loved drilling, and supports the gas industry but believes in responsible drilling. “Doing something like this to future generations, putting their water supply in jeopardy, everything they might have worked for all their life in jeopardy, their property in jeopardy,” Lane said. “This is wrong.”