Owners of mineral rights beneath the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania and the producers who want to extract that oil and gas do not have to wait for the US Forest Service to perform an environmental impact study before drilling, a federal appeals court ruled.
The 3rd US Court of Appeals Tuesday ruling upheld the US District Court for Western Pennsylvania's decision to issue an injunction barring Forest Service from applying the environmental impact study requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act to drilling in the 800-square mile national forest in northwest Pennsylvania.
The appeals court said the Forest Service should return to its previous practice of issuing a "notice to proceed" after receiving 60-day notice from the mineral owner.
The national forest runs south from the New York border in McKean and Warren counties and ends and Elk County. Neighboring Bradford County to the east has been a hotbed of drilling activity in the past two years with producers drilling hundreds of wells to extract the dry gas found in the northern Pennsylvania portion of the shale play.
In 2009, the Forest Service announced it would apply NEPA to the forest, a decision that would require a multi-year forest-wide environmental impact study of potential impacts before drilling operations could resume. The agency announced its policy as part of a 2009 settlement reached with environmental groups led by the Sierra Club.
The Pennsylvania Oil & Gas Association, private producer Minard Run Oil and the county of Warren, Pennsylvania, all sued for a return to procedures established in 1980 requiring only the 60-day notice to the Service before drilling began. More than 90% of the subsurface mineral rights are held by private owners or county governments, rights they kept when the US government purchased the land establishing the Forest in 1923.
The appeals court agreed with the lower court in finding that the Forest Service's NEPA settlement constituted a change in federal policy and the service had not allowed the mineral rights owners to participate in the rule-making allowing the change.
The appeals court further said that an injunction stopping the Forest Service was valid because the mineral owners would suffer irreparable harm waiting years for the EIS to be done and their case would likely succeed on its merits.
