The Bureau of Land Management announced Friday that it will auction 41 oil and gas parcels totaling 2,840 acres in the Wayne National Forest on September 15. This lease sale would bring modern hydraulic fracturing to Ohio’s only national forest for the first time, Signal Ohio reports. The Wayne isn’t one contiguous forest but three separate units scattered across southeast Ohio and West Virginia. The parcels up for lease are near Marietta, Ohio, and Parkersburg, West Virginia. Conventional, shallow oil wells have operated there since 1990. The wells this sale would enable are drilled far deeper and extended laterally to fracture shale.
After a lease is signed, the winning bidder has to come back with an application to drill, which triggers its own environmental review. Wendy Park, an attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity who has fought fracking in the Wayne for years, told Signal Ohio that step is likely to be a rubber stamp once the lease itself is in hand. In 2020, a federal court ruled in Center for Biological Diversity v. U.S. Forest Service that BLM and the Forest Service had failed to take NEPA’s required hard look at fracking’s threats to the endangered Indiana bat, the Little Muskingum River, and regional air quality before leasing more than 40,000 acres in the Wayne and blocked new leasing and drilling outright until the agencies redid the analysis. This September’s sale is the product of that do-over. Park says parallel litigation over other Wayne leases could still unravel the environmental analysis this sale now rests on.
Ohio has been leasing its own state parks and wildlife areas to oil and gas companies since 2024 under GOP-backed state legislation, and that program has already generated $314 million in signing bonuses and royalties across roughly 22,000 acres, including large blocks of Salt Fork State Park and the Egypt Valley and Jockey Hollow wildlife areas. Between the state’s parks and the federal forest, there is very little public land left in southeast Ohio that hasn’t been offered up.
BLM’s 30-day protest period on this specific lease sale runs through August 17, 2026, and instructions for filing a protest are posted on the BLM’s ePlanning site.
Photo: A sign for the Wayne National Forest headquarters in Nelsonville, Ohio.
