State officials are set to decide whether to accept bids or open up 23,000 acres of publicly owned wildlife preserves in eastern Ohio to the fracking industry.
The votes Monday could amount to a significant expansion of Ohio’s public lands leasing process, which has existed in dormant fashion since 2011 but was kick-started in 2023 via legislation passed by Republican lawmakers and signed by Gov. Mike DeWine.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission, a panel of gubernatorial appointees, will decide whether to accept the best bids for about 15,000 acres, split between Jockey Hollow and Egypt Valley wildlife areas. The two expanses stretch over a hilly section of the state a few miles east of Piedmont Lake.
The commission is also scheduled to vote on whether to open another 8,000 acres of Egypt Valley to oil and gas development. If approved, the state will have leased out more than 30,000 acres of Salt Fork State Park and six state wildlife areas, mostly in the Belmont-Harrison-Guernsey county region.
Ohio received about $57 million in signing bonuses from the first 7,000 acres leased by the state, mostly via the lease at Salt Fork, one of Ohio’s largest. And that doesn’t include the 18% to 20% in royalty payments Ohio is set to receive when extraction begins.
An Ohio Department of Natural Resources spokesperson couldn’t immediately provide state royalty revenue data on Thursday.
Near-unanimous opposition in public hearings to fracking public lands
Despite near-unanimous opposition in public hearings and written comment periods, the OGLMC has almost always accepted land nominations as they’ve rolled in since 2024.
State law shields the identity of the company that “nominates” the land at the OGLMC and only releases a company name when a winning bid has been selected.
A subsidiary of Gulfport Energy, an Oklahoma company, previously won a small lease for about 31 acres of Egypt Valley. A company spokesperson didn’t respond to an inquiry.
The state acquired the land at Egypt Valley via the Wildlife Restoration Act, which uses money from a special tax on guns and bullets to buy land for conservation purposes. Consol Energy gave Ohio what’s now Jockey Hollow after it was “extensively” surface mined between 1958 and 1968, according to ODNR.
The projects approved by the DeWine administration have all proposed drilling vertically from well pads adjacent to public lands. Thousands of feet underground, those well bores turn 90 degrees and reach laterally for oil and natural gas trapped in shale underground.
Save Ohio Parks, a grassroots advocacy group of environmentalists in Southeast Ohio, issued a statement criticizing what it has described as a “rubber stamp” OGLMC legal process.
“This is an insane amount of land that could be approved and awarded for fracking in just one meeting,” said Cathy Cowan Becker, board president at Save Ohio Parks. “If all these nominations and bids move forward, the state will have approved four times as much of our public land for fracking in 2026 as it did during the last three years combined.”