Last Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management announced that an oil and gas lease sale is scheduled for 42 parcels totaling more than 2,800 acres of national forest in Ohio this September. That means fracking is expected to come to the area for the first time.
Wayne National Forest is a “patchwork of public land that covers over a quarter million acres of Appalachian foothills of southeastern Ohio,” per the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service. It is Ohio’s only national forest and it has a long history of both mining and drilling for gas. While the forest covers around 244,000 total acres, the specific parcels up for leasing are located in Marietta, Ohio, and Parkersburg, W.V., Signal Ohio said.
According to the BLM, the bureau completed scoping of the 41 Wayne National Forest parcels for oil and gas in January of this year. With the lease projected to open on Sept. 15, fracking is expected to come to the area for the first time, Signal Ohio reported. Fracking is “a method used to extract natural gas and oil from deep rock formations known as shale,” explained the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences.
Already, the BLM has held a public comment period on the proposed lease from May 18 through June 17. Friday kicked off a 20-day public protest period to receive additional public input that will close on Aug. 17. Details for submitting a protest are available here.
During the public comment period that ended on June 17, the Ohio Environmental Council organization submitted concerns about the potential lease. It claimed that the “neither the 2016 Final Environmental Assessment (FEA) nor the 2025 Final Supplemental Environmental Assessment (FSEA), which BLM purports are ‘adequate’ for the purposes of assessing the Ohio Lease Sale, satisfy its obligations under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) and numerous other environmental laws.”
It also listed concerns about the BLM’s analysis of impacts to air quality, an alleged failure to include Washington County in air pollution estimates, pollution estimates that allegedly could exceed Clean Air Act thresholds of concern, “unreliable” water withdrawal estimates, potential impacts to freshwater mussels and Hellbenders and potential impacts to bat species. The OEC also said that the leasing project “threatens to cancel the Wayne National Forest’s carbon sequestration services for several decades,” and that the “BLM must evaluate potential Regional Haze Impacts.”
Wendy Park, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity cited by Signal Ohio, highlighted concerns about leasing the land for oil and gas production too. She said that “litigation involving other previously leased lands in Wayne could invalidate the environmental analysis used to support the September 2026 lease sale, but there’s no telling what a judge might do,” per the outlet.
Leasing would just be the first step in a process to develop the area for federal oil and gas resources, the BLM noted last Friday. An operator must also apply for a permit to drill with detailed development plans before any fracking operations go forward.
“The BLM reviews applications for permits to drill, posts them for public review, conducts an environmental analysis and coordinates with state partners and stakeholders,” said the agency. It added that “all parcels that are included in a federal oil and gas lease sale include appropriate stipulations to protect important natural resources.”
President Donald Trump’s administration “has aggressively pursued opening public land to the energy industry,” according to Signal Ohio. In Ohio, GOP-backed legislation has recently opened up around 22,000 acres of state parks and wildlife areas to oil and gas companies, the outlet added.
Total receipts generated by the BLM from oil and gas lease sales held in the second quarter of the year came in at more than $4.1 billion, said the agency in a press release issued last Thursday. It said “these revenues reflect an ongoing focus on unleashing domestic energy, supporting job growth, and promoting efficient, streamlined permitting and leasing processes.”
