Environmentalists and energy boosters alike welcomed a federal compromise announced Tuesday that will allow fracking in the largest national forest in the eastern United States, but make most of its woods off-limits to drilling.
The decision was highly anticipated because about half of the George Washington National Forest sits atop the Marcellus shale formation, a vast underground deposit of natural gas that runs from upstate New York to West Virginia and yields more than $10 billion in gas a year.
The federal management plan reverses an outright ban on hydraulic fracturing that the U.S. Forest Service had proposed in 2011 for the 1.1 million-acre forest, which includes the headwaters of the James and Potomac rivers. Those rivers feed the Chesapeake Bay, which is the focus of a multibillion-dollar, multistate restoration directed by the Environmental Protection Agency.This is a bigger deal than the vote on the Keystone.
Note: the environmentalists have a completely different take on it but the fact remains:
The final forest plan released Tuesday includes differences from the Forest Service’s draft plan for the area. The draft plan, for example, would have banned the use of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing — or ‘fracking’ — techniques in the national forest, a provision that the oil and gas industry strongly opposed. Industry groups argued this provision would set a precedent for prohibiting fracking techniques in other national forests.
Robert Bonnie, U.S. Department of Agriculture Undersecretary for Natural Resources and the Environment, said, “from a policy perspective, the Forest Service allows fracking on forest lands throughout the country. We didn’t want to make a policy decision or change policy related to fracking. This decision is about where it’s appropriate to do oil and gas leasing.”Two more years.
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