State officials selected winning bids Monday worth a total of $242 million from a handful of out-of-state oil and gas companies to frack about 15,000 acres of state-owned preserved wildlife areas and state parkland in eastern Ohio.
The Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission also rejected applications to open about 8,000 acres of land in the same area for development, given the crossover between those parcels and some of those that were bid out.
Despite the rejections, the votes from the Ohio Oil and Gas Land Management Commission amount to a significant expansion of Ohio’s three-year-old practice of leasing out its public lands to the fracking industry…