Federal officials move to open Ohio forest to fracking

Federal officials moved to open nearly 2,800 acres of Wayne National Forest to oil and gas leasing, advancing a September 2026 sale for 41 parcels in Ohio’s only national forest. The Bureau of Land Management also opened an initial public input period and set a separate 30-day comment window that ended June 17, putting the proposal at the center of the administration’s public-lands fight over whether federal acreage should be drilled or protected.

The plan would extend the federal government’s multiple-use and sustained-yield mandate into a forest that has long been a test case for energy development on public land. Wayne National Forest covers about 244,000 acres in southeastern Ohio, and the new sale would touch only a fraction of it, but the acreage is still large enough to matter for nearby counties that have lived with oil and gas interest for decades. Supporters are likely to frame the leases as a source of royalties, lease payments and drilling-related work for local governments, landowners and service companies across the region.

Critics say the risks are just as concrete. Conservation groups have warned that drilling could strain waterways including the Little Muskingum River and local tributaries, add truck traffic and road damage, and disrupt habitat in a landscape many residents use for hunting, hiking and other recreation. The Ohio Environmental Council, Center for Biological Diversity, Buckeye Environmental Network, The Wilderness Society, Sierra Club and Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition have kept pressure on federal officials to stop the sale.

This is also not Wayne’s first collision with the politics of fracking. In December 2016, federal agencies approved a plan to lease 40,000 acres of the forest for large-scale, high-volume fracking of the Marcellus and Utica shale, setting off years of legal and political fights. Conservation groups later described a March 2021 federal court decision as blocking oil and gas extraction on Ohio’s only national forest. The new proposal is narrower, at 41 parcels and nearly 2,800 acres, but it carries the same symbolic weight: it would mark the first potential fracking in Ohio’s only national forest and could become the next test of how far the current administration is willing to push oil and gas development on federal land.