Industry and environmental challenges to the oil and natural gas drilling policy contained in the Allegheny National Forest's new 10-year management plan could lead the U.S. Forest Service to rewrite major portions of the plan or scrap it all together.

More than 80 appeals, most of them related to the new oil and gas policy, have been filed on the 9-month-old plan that cost the Forest Service millions of dollars to develop and took more than five years to write.

"What I heard originally was the Forest Service was just going to order a rewrite of the oil and gas section, but it can't because oil and gas policy impacts every part of the forest plan," said Jim Hovey, a supervisor in Warren County's Mead Township, which is adjacent to the 513,000-acre national forest.

"I have a source inside the Forest Service," Mr. Hovey said, "telling me they'll have to rewrite the entire thing."

Mr. Hovey said his source was not at the Allegheny National Forest headquarters in Warren, but at the U.S. Forest Service's regional office in Milwaukee.

More than 8,000 active wells are operating in the Allegheny National Forest, including about 2,000 drilled last year, more than in all other national forests in the country combined.

That high level of drilling activity is possible because when the federal government began assembling land in 1923 for the forest that sprawls over Elk, Forest, McKean and Warren counties there was only enough money appropriated to purchase the surface property rights. As a result, oil companies now own the mineral rights under 95 percent of the forest, and high oil and gasoline prices have sparked one of the biggest drilling booms in northwest Pennsylvania since 1853, when the world's first oil well was drilled in Titusville, Crawford County.

Despite the activity, oil and gas exploration and drilling were not addressed as a "major issue" in the lengthy rewrite of the forest's management plan. That intentional omission by Allegheny National Forest administrators led environmental and recreation groups to file an appeal of the new plan in July, claiming the drilling activity is fragmenting and degrading the forest's environment.

But the plan does contain new well drilling standards aimed at minimizing environmental disruptions, and that has caused the drilling industry to file dozens of appeals.

Stephen Rhodes, president of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, said the group has met with the Forest Service to attempt to resolve its appeals and explained to the surface property owner that it has no legal standing to regulate access to oil and gas deposits underground.

"The new plan seeks to rewrite the relationship of the U.S. Forest Service and the oil and gas companies that own the mineral rights there. During the dialogue we told them or suggested that the forest plan should be revisited, but we weren't talking about the entire plan," Mr. Rhodes said.

"We expected them [the Forest Service] to do something," he said, "But we'd be surprised if it was that draconian."

Ryan Talbot, forest watch coordinator for the Allegheny Defense Project, one of the environmental groups that filed a July appeal, said Mr. Hovey's statement that the forest plan could be scrapped took them by surprise, too, since those groups are also in the middle of meetings with the Forest Service to resolve their appeal.

Cathy Frank, a spokeswoman for the Allegheny National Forest, said the Forest Service's Washington headquarters is reviewing all its options on the appeals. A decision is expected by mid-February.

"The decision could be to uphold the original plan and deny the appeals, or rescind the entire thing, or anything in between," Ms. Frank said.