Legalectric

“The 5-mile radius, we were told by our geologists, is an adequate buffer zone” for the fault line, Zehringer said. “There are four other wells, none of them active, but we’re not going to allow any activity to take place in these wells.”

Michael Hansen, of the Ohio Seismic Network, said that even though Northstar No. 1 was shut down Friday, there is still potential for more quakes, although the magnitude of yesterday’s quake may have relieved some of the pressure near the fault line.

There are 177 injection wells throughout the state. Zehringer and other officials, speaking on a New Year’s Eve conference call, said the single Youngstown well is the only one of its kind that’s been related to seismic activity since the state started using them in the 1970s.

Kasich officials also stressed that the months-long shaking in Youngstown is not a result of hydraulic fracking — a procedure used to extract oil and gas out of rock formations such as the Marcellus and Utica shale. Discoveries of oil and gas in the shale rock in eastern Ohio has sparked hopes for an economic boon in the state’s Appalachian region.

State Rep. Robert F. Hagan, D-Youngstown, called for a statewide moratorium on injection wells. Hagan said he asked the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to intervene because of the possibility of another quake.

“We don’t want to overreact,” said Zehringer, who suggested that a wider moratorium in well activity “could devastate the economic livelihood of thousands of Ohioans.”

The magnitude 4.0 quake that struck yesterday afternoon in McDonald, outside Youngstown, is the largest of the 11 quakes that originated there, Hansen said.

Residents said a boom accompanied the shaking yesterday. Sheriff’s dispatchers from several counties in the area said there were no immediate reports of damage.

Rick Simmers, chief of oil and gas management for the ODNR, said a daily average of about 5,000 42-gallon barrels of brine water — a byproduct of oil and gas drilling — were pumped into the well, down to 9,200 feet. He said a majority of the water comes from Pennsylvania wells.

Gov. John Kasich, who is vacationing with his family in Florida for the holidays, was in constant contact with Zehringer and other senior staff members throughout the day yesterday, communications director Scott Milburn said. “The governor directed director Zehringer to put public health and safety first and to make a response that is reasonable and appropriate and based on science,” Milburn said.

The well’s owner, Northstar Disposal Services LLC, which agreed to stop injecting brine into the well on Friday, applied for and received licensing under the Strickland administration, Kasich spokesman Rob Nichols said. The No. 1 well has been active since December, 2010, according to Nichols.

However, the private contract conceals the added costs, since it’s considered “trade secret” information.

Problems arise when out-of-state investors take advantage of the lack of transparency in existing statutes, which permit wind developers and utilities to charge higher rates for locally owned renewable energy.

This is precisely what’s happening in Goodhue County.

Although the Goodhue County project may have initially qualified as a C-BED project, it has dramatically changed since it began in 2008.

Today, it may fail to fulfill the C-BED criteria, and unfortunately, the Minnesota Public Utilities Commission has turned a blind eye.

C-BED law dictates that no single qualifying owner can own more than 15 percent of a C-BED wind energy project. The Goodhue project began small and locally owned but transformed into a large wind development plan.

Instead of the financial benefits of this renewable-energy project staying in Goodhue County, they’ll likely be sent to a billionaire with a Texas address.

We have requested a Public Utilities Commission investigative hearing into the C-BED eligibility of the Goodhue project. In addition, we encourage our House and Senate colleagues to join us in calling for an examination of C-BED statutes through a legislative hearing.

Our intentions are not to attack wind energy. We aim to ensure public trust in the renewable-energy industry. C-BED must bring value in an accountable and transparent way.

As renewable-energy projects evolve, they must be reevaluated to ensure that they still meet the requirements of a C-BED project.

We have a duty to protect our citizens from out-of-state corporations taking advantage of local resources. Doing so will ensure that the additional dollars paid by Minnesota ratepayers for C-BED energy will remain in our communities.

State and local officials must work together to guarantee that only projects that are truly community-based and community-supported move forward with a C-BED status.

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In Worthington, Nancy Vaske, the general manager of the AmericInn, a landowner in the Nobles Wind Project, emphasized in a statement to Wind on the Wires (an industry trade group) the benefit her community received:

“We had many [project] employees staying at our property the entire time. All the other motels were very busy as well. All of the workers used our local restaurants, and shopped at all our stores,” she said. Worthington and surrounding communities have seen a boom in recent years due to the wind industry.

As for the energy produced, Vaske continued: “The claim that none of the wind towers will benefit the local people is not true. We will all benefit because this is helping all of us not depend on other counties for our energy needs. When I see my tower turning I think not of personal gain but of the energy we are not depending on someone else for.”

Minnesota has been a leader in wind energy development since the early 1990s.

This leadership has yielded a commitment from wind developers, manufacturers and construction companies to locate and expand their businesses in and around the state. Mortenson Construction, a Minnesota-based company, is a national leader in wind farm construction.

At a time when the state is doing all it can to attract good-paying jobs, would you have these companies take their business elsewhere?

On the matter of subsidies, readers should know that the results-based Production Tax Credit is only a fraction of the subsidy that other forms of energy production have been receiving for decades.

Businesses need a certain level of certainty in order to grow and hire. The federal government has provided such certainty to oil and gas companies for decades with permanent subsidies through the tax code. We’d like to level the playing field.

A recent study, “What Would Jefferson Do?” by DBL Investors, states that the current incentives for renewable energy “do not constitute an over-subsidized outlier when compared to the historical norm for emerging sources of energy. For example … the federal commitment to [oil and gas] was five times greater than the federal commitment to renewables during the first 15 years of each [incentive’s] life, and it was more than 10 times greater for nuclear.”

Over the last decade, the wind industry has added thousands of jobs. With an extension of the tax credit, it is poised to create or save 54,000 jobs in the next four years.

Furthermore, a new study by Navigant Consulting finds that if Congress allows the tax credit to expire, major job losses will be immediate.

This not only threatens nearly 100,000 jobs the wind industry will otherwise have in the near term, but also the 500,000 jobs the Bush administration found would result if wind produced 20 percent of America’s electricity by 2030, which the industry is on track to achieve.

The Navigant study also concludes that the tax credit extension would cost about $13.6 billion but would result in approximately $25.6 billion in investment and tax revenue.

The bottom line is that wind energy in Minnesota is sound business and smart policy. It’s good for consumers.

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