The U.S. Forest Service's regional office in Milwaukee has taken over management of the booming oil and gas industry operations on the Allegheny National Forest, where thousands of wells have been drilled in recent years.

Using rarely exercised authority, the regional office will review all applications for access to the privately owned oil and gas reserves under the Allegheny National Forest. Those reviews had been done by Forest Service workers on the Allegheny who have been ordered not to approve or sign any "notice to proceed" documents until reviews by the regional office are completed.

The Forest Service also said it will begin a detailed environmental impact study of oil and gas drilling operations on the 513,000-acre national forest, including a review of proposed rules for well drilling, road building and pipeline construction that are already the subject of ongoing litigation by the industry.

Notice of that environmental impact study is scheduled to be printed in the Federal Register on or before Feb. 27.

The new notice review protocol, together with the environmental impact study, could delay new drilling startups and signal an attempt by the Forest Service to better regulate the impact of the oil and gas wells over which environmental and recreational groups have long complained.

"Now, after years of allowing oil and gas companies to run rampant across Pennsylvania's only national forest without stipulations to protect surface and water resources, the Forest Service is finally attempting to comply with the law," said Ryan Talbott, forest watch coordinator for the Allegheny Defense Project. "This is long overdue."

But the oil and gas industry views the Forest Service initiatives as an effort to control private property rights held by oil and gas companies.

"These actions by the Forest Service seem to be an attempt to take more control over our activities on the land," said Steve Rhodes, president of the Pennsylvania Oil and Gas Association, the oil and gas trade association in the state. "But we don't apply for permission to drill; we notify them of our plans. They cannot dictate whether we use the surface."

That legal position is disputed by the Forest Service, which claims it shares authority with the state Department of Environmental Protection to regulate oil and gas drilling activity, and by environmentalists who claim the Forest Service has a responsibility to protect the forest environment from the effects of oil and gas drilling.

Well drilling is possible in the Allegheny National Forest, unlike on most other national forests, because when the federal government established the forest -- in 1923 in Elk, Forest, McKean and Warren counties -- a decision was made to use the limited funding provided to buy as much land or surface rights as possible, but not mineral rights.

Oil and gas companies own those subsurface mineral rights under 95 percent of the national forest, and because those property rights are considered "dominant," the companies have a limited right to use surface land owned by the Forest Service to access those reserves.

High demand and prices for oil and gas have spurred drilling in the forest in recent years and raised environmental concerns about water pollution, forest fragmentation and wildlife impacts. More than 1,000 wells were drilled in each of the last two years and more than 9,000 wells are now operating in the forest.

Whether the new Forest Service procedure delays well drilling on the Allegheny remains to be seen, Mr. Rhodes said.

"No notices to proceed have been sent out recently, but it's the middle of winter when things slow down," he said. "Whether this will affect drilling operators we don't know yet. If it's an attempt to stop drilling, that confrontational stance could cause some problems.

"It might force the operators to move ahead on their own without waiting for the Forest Service."

The decision to order an environmental impact study of the oil and gas operations on the forest comes a year after the Forest Service determined that a 10-year management plan produced by the Allegheny National Forest in 2007 failed to assess the cumulative effects of the drilling and didn't provide an opportunity for public comment on the plan's oil and gas development rules.

"Why it took a year for the Forest Service to get to this point I don't understand," said Mr. Talbott. "It's finally getting around to what we said it should do in 2003, but they've ignored it for so long we don't know how many thousands of wells have been drilled in the forest since then or what their environmental impact has been."