More land open for oil, gas leases

More of Wayne National Forest is up for auction.

Federal officials announced that oil and natural-gas leases for nearly 1,200 acres of the forest’s Marietta Unit in southeastern Ohio will be sold online in March.

In December, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management netted more than $1.7 million in an auction of more than 700 acres of the forest for eventual fracking, despite protests by environmental groups.

The agency intended to include more land in the 2016 sale but withdrew several parcels at the last minute because of questions about ownership. Officials reintroduced seven of the shelved parcels for the March 23 sale.

The oil and gas leases could introduce Ohio’s only national forest to fracking, a process that involves injecting as much as 5 million gallons of water, sand and chemicals below ground to fracture deep shale and free trapped oil and gas.

Environmental advocates say they will continue to

fight the auctions.

“It’s an expected hurdle,” said Roxanne Groff, a former Athens County commissioner and member of the Athens County Fracking Action Network. “It’s more of the same, and we’ll continue to deal with it, to try to interrupt the process.”

Groff and other local advocates question the adequacy of several official environmental assessments, saying they rely on outdated studies.

But others see the auction as resolving a different issue.

Companies already have begun leasing private property in the forest in the hopes of tapping some of the state’s most prolific Utica-shale reserves, said Shawn Bennett, executive vice president of the Ohio Oil and Gas Association.

Unlike other national forests, Wayne is a patchwork of public and private land, so the industry has yet to develop those resources because pockets owned by the federal government stand in the way, he said.

“They’ve been sitting in limbo. Without these parcels auctioned off, you’re sterilizing private landowners’ abilities to develop the resources and receive royalties,” Bennett said. “It isn’t about opening these large swaths of land that bring in these companies. It’s about filling in holes.”

Environmentalists are aware of the vigorous industry push to develop Wayne forest, said Wendy Park, a senior attorney for the Center for Biological Diversity’s Public Lands Program.

“It’s not a surprise that they’re continuing forward this way,” she said. “It is disappointing, though.”

Park hopes the U.S. Forest Service withdraws nationalforest land slated for oil and gas auction, as it did last year in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Before December’s auction of Wayne land, the Bureau of Land Management denied 100 public complaints that focused on the sale’s potential effects on environmental justice, public health and air and water quality.

A 30-day public-comment period for the upcoming auction will close Feb. 13. The bureau is required to respond by the March 23 sale date.

Winners of auctioned oil and gas leases are not given a green light to drill wells. Instead, the leases open a 10-year window to apply for permits necessary to explore the land for oil and gas resources.

Eclipse Resources, a Pennsylvania-based oil and gas company, led December’s pack of six winning bidders, spending more than $927,000 on 11 parcels of land.

Since the sale, the Bureau of Land Management has yet to receive any application for a permit to drill in its 20-state Northeastern States District, which includes Ohio, officials said.