A dozen years ago, as fracking was getting started in Ohio and was already well underway in Pennsylvania, data researcher Ted Auch began working at the new nonprofit, FracTracker Alliance, which tracks the risks of oil, gas and petrochemical industries.
Auch has been using photography, maps and data analysis to document the region’s gas and petrochemical industries and has been a source for many Allegheny Front stories about the industry’s waste and water usage in Ohio and the region.
He has recently announced he’s leaving FracTracker. He spoke with The Allegheny Front’s Julie Grant.
LISTEN to their conversation
The interview has been edited for clarity.
Ted Auch: I didn’t know much about fracking per se at the time, but everything that I was reading reminded me of my graduate work when I was a master’s student at Virginia Tech, where we were looking at what coal mining does to communities and what it does to the landscape and to ecosystems.
It was like all the same stuff was coming back. It was really striking [to] me as another one of these examples of big industry bullying and holding hostage communities that have otherwise been left to rot. I just hated it. I hated seeing that. So I applied for the job with FracTracker, and, you know, fortunately, I brought some skills that they didn’t have, but also I learned a whole hell of a lot throughout my time.
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Julie Grant: You said when you started, you didn’t know much about fracking. I think back 12 or 13 years ago, most people in the region didn’t that much about fracking. So I guess the whole region had to get educated in a certain way.
Ted Auch: Yeah, and it came on fast and furious. I always use the phrase, you know, ‘fire, aim, ready.’ That was the approach by the Ohio Department of Natural Resources, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and really no one thinks about these communities unless they’re making fun of them or needing something out of them in terms of natural resources and beyond that they never think about them and they don’t really care about them.
Those communities are looking for alternatives, and fracking presented itself as a panacea for all that ailed them, which we know it not to be. But at the time, it was like, there’s really nothing else being offered to them, so who are we to kind of, you know [tell them what to do]? So it was just a tricky situation.
Julie Grant: We were talking in our newsroom about stories that I’ve talked with you about through the years and there was one we went up and you were going up in a small plane to look at where there had been a well pad explosion and then an ongoing gas leak in southern Ohio, this was 2018, and gas poured out of there for like three weeks. I did get sick on that one.
Ted Auch: Oh yeah. That was an XTO, an Exxon subsidiary. They had a well pad explosion and FAA [Federal Aviation Administration], they had established a temporary flight restriction around the area so you couldn’t get within a stone’s throw of the place. I remember us flying around and trying to get photos of it because it was just so hard to see. Yeah, that was a really scary event.
It was like that, and the Eisenbarth pad a couple of years prior to that, there are these large events that happen every so often. They receive a lot of coverage, but I would contend that a lot of the stuff, whether it’s the gathering pipelines that take the gas down to transmission lines or some of these pads in hard to reach spots, like we’ve flown over parts of Pennsylvania, very remote parts, and seen well pad explosions that hadn’t even been documented yet, and the point of that is just to say, you are arraying this infrastructure over very rural, mountainous landscape. Very hard to understand the total impacts of something when it’s spread out over such a large area.
The oil and gas industry has been really good at distributing their impact over larger areas. They’re not like what you would call a “point source” emitter, like a coal plant or a refinery. They’re “non-point,” like all over the place. And linking X to Y is quantitatively very difficult and has always been difficult. That’s really one of the ways that they’ve gotten away with what they’ve done, is we don’t have background data.
Julie Grant: What are your continuing concerns with this industry?
Ted Auch: Everyone to this point has heard about the Halliburton loophole.
Julie Grant: That’s when, at the federal level, they [drillers] don’t have to disclose the chemicals they’re using.
Ted Auch: Right. I think what we need to be doing is changing laws or creating new laws, because that’s where the rubber meets the road. I think the number one [law] should be [about] waste, their waste impact, and their water impact.
My primary concerns are: What does uncontrollable production of waste mean for the region long after natural gas has been stripped from all these wells? That’s one. And then two is: Who’s going to be left standing when the music stops with regard to plugging these wells? And that’s going to be on the taxpayer.
If you look at the actuarial numbers for what it costs to plug a well, and we did this at FracTracker from like 300 wells in North Dakota we had data on, the state [ND] thinks they’re working under the $65,000 to $85,000 per well assumption. The data bears out, you’re talking about $300 [thousand], $400 [thousand], sometimes $500,000 to plug and reclaim a site. That would blow a hole in the general budget in Ohio or any budget.
So I think these kinds of actuarial assumptions and these kinds of made-up [costs] that the industry is being allowed to present are really concerning to me because by the time my kids are my age, if they’re still living in Ohio, they’re going to be left on the hook to plug these wells.
Julie Grant: So what is the change that you’re making? What are you going to be doing? And why did you decide to make a change when you see that this industry is still moving forward and is getting a lot of support these days?
Ted Auch: I think my reading of Project 2025 last year, and I read the whole darn thing…And I was just thinking about what’s going on in Ohio. And frankly, like what Teresa Mills [a longtime environmental activist in Ohio, who died in 2023] used to say to me a long time ago, ‘We just have bad laws.’ We need laws that can fight for rather than fight against people.
I wasn’t feeling like I was contributing enough, and it was time to do something different and teach myself new stuff. So I’m joining this group called Fieldnotes, which is an amazing young nonprofit, similarly sized to when I joined FracTracker. They’re working at the intersection of like legislation, political, politics, dark money.
And, [I want to] bring justice to bear in another way, because data is great, but I always say [that] to me, maps, bar charts, scatter plots (like the work he’s done at FracTracker), they’re all self-evident why they’re so interesting and important, but that isn’t the case for most people. Most people just tune all that stuff out. So, [I’m] trying to go at it from a different angle.
Julie Grant: Are there any specific laws that you’re thinking about looking at that you’d like to see?
Ted Auch: States where, I’m thinking specifically of Louisiana, these industries and these corridors that they’ve established are so ubiquitous and so impactful on the communities. And yet these people have been shuttered into like, you know, the fear of G-d has been put into them [if they monitor pollution from the gas industry, and speak out.] I worry that those models are going to come to places like the Ohio River Valley.
Also, one area of interest I have is legislation around data centers. What is the value proposition that’s being put forth for data centers? What are the tax incentives? What does the impact of data centers have on rate payers, on the huge consumers of water, natural gas consumption? So kind of going out, looking at some of the same players, but where they’re operating in different spaces.
Julie Grant: Will you be staying in this region?
Ted Auch: We’re not going anywhere. We love it here. I mean, warts and all, we love it.
Ted Auch is former Midwest program director of the FracTracker Alliance.
