Agencies announce ‘West-wide’ Energy Corridor review workshops in five western states
Organization
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The Bureau of Land Management, U.S. Forest Service, and U.S. Department of Energy will hold public workshops between May 31 and June 13 in five western states to gather input on ongoing reviews of regional energy corridors on Federal lands managed by the BLM and FS.
All meetings will be held from 9:00 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. local time. The dates and locations for the public workshops are as follows:
- May 31, 2018: BIA Southwest Regional Office, Albuquerque, New Mexico
- June 4, 2018: BLM Arizona State Office, Phoenix, Arizona
- June 6, 2018: Nugget Hotel, Reno, Nevada
- June 11, 2018: Double Tree Hotel, Grand Junction, Colorado
- June 13, 2018: Sevier County Administrative Building, Richfield, Utah
The corridors – commonly known as “West-wide” or “Section 368” corridors – were designated under direction of Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005 to support siting of oil, gas, and hydrogen pipelines, as well as electric transmission and distribution lines. The BLM and the Forest Service designated approximately 6,000 miles of corridors, and later agreed to review the corridors in a court agreement with environmental groups.
The intent of the workshops are to get stakeholder input on specific corridors, using information from corridor review documents (abstracts). Breakout sessions will discuss the viability of potential corridor revisions identified in the abstracts. Also to be discussed are potential enhancements to interagency operating procedures. The agencies will use the input to develop a draft report.
For the reviews, corridors have been divided into six regions (see attached map). In May 2016 the BLM, FS, and DOE released a study of the effectiveness of these corridors (available at http://corridoreis.anl.gov/) to inform the subsequent regional reviews.
The Region 1 review, which includes southern Nevada, southern California, and western Arizona, began in 2016 and is slated to finish this year. The Region 2 and 3 review, which is the focus of the upcoming workshops, began last year and includes Federal lands in each of the workshop states. The review for the remaining three regions is expected to begin in 2019.
For more information, visit the West-wide Energy Corridor Information Center web site at http://corridoreis.anl.gov, or contact Jeremy Bluma, Project Manager, at 208-373-3847 or jbluma@blm.gov. For FS-specific questions, contact Reggie Woodruff at 202-205-1196 or rwoodruff@fs.fed.us.
The BLM manages more than 245 million acres of public land located primarily in 12 western states, including Alaska, on behalf of the American people. The BLM also administers 700 million acres of sub-surface mineral estate throughout the nation. Our mission is to sustain the health, diversity, and productivity of America’s public lands for the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.