While local officials weigh permits and setback ordinances, a picture is emerging from state geological surveys, federal environmental records, and engineering research that raises a question nobody seems to be asking: Has anyone actually looked at what's underneath the land being targeted for industrial solar development?
Based on everything we've been able to document, the answer is no.
A County Built on What Was Left Behind
Knox County has a deep industrial history — and a subsurface to match. The Indiana Geological Survey's Special Report 54 documents the county's coal mining legacy in detail, noting a cumulative production value worth several billion dollars. The Enoco Coal Mine alone operated from 1941 to 1962, leaving behind a network of underground tunnels that remain there to this day. The DNR's Division of Reclamation has specifically described Knox County as "heavily impacted by historic coal mining activities."
Those tunnels don't disappear. They settle. They fill with water. And in some cases, they fill with gas.
Knox County is one of only five Indiana counties where coalbed methane and mine void gas are currently being produced — meaning methane is actively migrating through underground coal formations and old mine workings right now. The Indiana Geological & Water Survey confirms this. The EPA has separately documented that abandoned mines release methane through vents, fissures, and boreholes. At concentrations between 5% and 15% in air, methane is explosive.
Subsurface risk doesn't end with mining. The Indiana DNR Division of Oil & Gas has documented more than 70,000 oil and gas wells drilled across Indiana since the 1880s. Knox County has been a significant production area. Many of those wells are abandoned or orphaned — no owner, no operator, and in many cases, no surface marker. The DNR has conducted plugging operations right here in Knox County, including closing five orphaned wells near Westphalia south of Bicknell, where crews also had to remediate a two-acre crude oil sludge pit. Investigators keep finding wells that weren't on any map.
A 2023 WRTV/ABC News investigation tested 76 abandoned wells across five states and found more than half were actively leaking oil or combustible gas at the time of testing.
Layered beneath all of this is CenterPoint Energy's natural gas distribution network, serving approximately 114,000 customers across southwestern Indiana — including Knox County — through an extensive system of buried pipelines. The company has filed plans for $280 million in regional infrastructure investment. That infrastructure runs under the same farmland now being targeted for solar development.
The Pile Driving Problem
Industrial-scale solar farms are not passive installations. Large projects can require hundreds of thousands of steel H-beams driven eight feet or more into the earth, hammered or vibrated into place across hundreds of acres.
Engineering research has established that pile driving vibrations can damage buried gas pipelines. Peer-reviewed studies have identified specific damage thresholds based on peak particle velocity. But those studies were conducted for conventional heavy construction — not for solar-specific pile driving at this scale, and not over terrain with the subsurface complexity Knox County presents.
No equivalent research exists for what happens when you drive tens of thousands of piles across land underlain by abandoned mine voids, active methane migration corridors, and century-old well casings with no surface markers. The risks are not theoretical:
- A single pile could strike an undocumented well casing, cracking aging infrastructure and opening a new pathway for gas to reach the surface.
- A pile could penetrate into a mine void, breaching a sealed section containing concentrated methane.
- Repeated pile driving over undermined land can accelerate subsidence — the DNR's own reclamation data shows Knox County has the shallow mine workings where pit and sag subsidence are documented concerns.
- A solar installation full of inverters, transformers, and live electrical equipment, sitting on unstable and gas-permeable ground with minimal on-site personnel, compounds every one of these risks.
This is documented geology intersecting with documented infrastructure in ways that demand documented answers — before construction begins, not after.
The Operator in Question
The company behind the Ratts 2 / Blue Jeans Solar project in Knox County is Arevon Energy. Their track record on this project alone raises serious questions about whether any developer can be trusted to voluntarily conduct the subsurface due diligence this county requires.
Arevon signed a Power Purchase Agreement with Hoosier Energy in 2021 and promised construction would begin in 2022 with commercial operation in 2023. That PPA fell through. They returned to the Area Plan Commission seeking an extension — a request that a local attorney publicly characterized as an unlawful attempt to revive a legally expired approval. Even one of the APC members who voted in favor called missing the original deadline "shameful."
A recent FERC order has now granted Arevon yet another commercial operation deadline extension, pushing the target to December 2028. The project remains years behind schedule with no executed agreement to sell its electricity.
If a developer cannot manage the basic fundamentals of its own project, what confidence should Knox County residents have that they will voluntarily map every abandoned well, chart every mine void, and identify every buried gas line beneath their proposed footprint? The answer is none — unless the county requires it.
What We're Asking For
This is not opposition to solar energy. It is a demand for basic competence and accountability before industrial construction begins on land with documented underground hazards.
Knox County's commissioners and the APC should be meeting with the Indiana DNR — both the Division of Oil & Gas and the Division of Reclamation — to understand what lies beneath this county before approving any further development. That means pulling the mine maps. Reviewing the underground workings. Talking to the professionals who deal with orphaned wells, acid mine drainage, and methane migration every day.
Knox County's population has declined steadily — from 38,440 in the 2010 census to roughly 35,700–35,900 as of 2024, a loss of more than 2,700 residents. A county losing people cannot afford to gamble on inadequate oversight of industrial development that burdens the residents who remain.
500-foot setbacks are not a death sentence for solar development. They are the responsible minimum for a county with this geology, from officials who swore an oath to protect the people who live here.
Our families live here. Our children go to school here. Our wells draw water from this ground. If our elected representatives won't do this homework, we'll keep doing it for them.