The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit has once again cleared the way for drilling to continue in the Allegheny National Forest after a long battle between mineral rights owners, the U.S. Forest Service and environmental groups.
In a nonprecedential 10-page opinion issued Thursday in Minard Run Oil v. U.S. Forest Service — known as Minard Run IV — a three-judge panel said the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Pennsylvania was right to convert its initial grant of a preliminary injunction into a final declaratory judgment on the merits in favor of the mineral rights owners following the Third Circuit’s 2012 opinion in Minard Run III, in which it had upheld the injunction grant and found that an environmental impact study (EIS) did not need to be conducted before drilling operations commenced in the forest.
