Senate leaders are talking about possibly creating a so-called " fracking " tax through this year’s budget plan. The fight over increasing the oil and natural gas tax has been a long battle on many fronts. The Senate plans on releasing a revised budget any day now and it might include an increase to what’s known as the severance tax—this is a tax on the oil and gas extracted from Ohio’s shale. If that happens, it could be Gov. John Kasich’s closest shot at getting an increase to pass in three years. Right now, the rate is at $.20 per barrel of oil and $.03 per 1,000 cubic feet, or MCF, of natural gas. Kasich says that’s way too low for a state with a booming shale natural gas industry. “That’s unbelievable. We wanted to raise it like 4 or 4.5 percent - we would have the lowest severance tax in America,” Kasich said. His fight to raise the severance tax officially began in 2012 when he proposed, in his budget update, hiking the rate to 1.5 percent of the value of the well in the first
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