Glick Pushes Law to Scale Back Fossil Fuel Drilling on Public Land
State Assembly member Deborah Glick has succeeded in passing a bill that would (if signed into law) ban the leasing of New York State public lands for the exploration and production of oil and gas, while also prohibiting current leases for these areas to be expanded, renewed, or used to drill new wells.
Ms. Glick’s bill applies to the State’s forests, reforestation areas, wildlife management areas, and “unique areas” – lands designated by the Department of Environmental Conservation to protect special natural, scenic, or educational resources.
Ms. Glick, who represents Tribeca in Albany, where she chairs the Assembly’s Committee on Environmental Conservation, said, “New York’s state forests and wildlife management areas exist to protect wildlife habitat and natural resources for all New Yorkers, not for fossil fuel extraction. This legislation protects these lands from new oil and gas development while ensuring that existing leases cannot expand and must end when they expire.”
The extraction of oil and gas in New York State was valued at $38.6 million in 2023 (the last year for which statistics are available), according to the DEC, with roughly $4.83 million in royalties going to the private land owners on whose property some 14,000 active wells are located. In 2014, then-Governor Andrew Cuomo banned large-scale hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) in New York through executive order, a moratorium that was formalized and made permanent by the legislature in 2020.
“The leases in these areas represent not more than one percent of production in the State, so there is a de minimis loss of production capacity,” Ms. Glick continued, adding that her legislation mandates that “important environmental work such as well plugging can continue.” This was a reference to the ongoing remediation work at an estimated 60,000 abandoned “ghost” wells, many dating from the 1800s, which pose risks to air, water, and public health.
In partnership with Ms. Glick, State Senator José Serrano has secured passage of an identical measure in his house of the State legislature. A spokesman for Governor Kathy Hochul did not respond to a request for comment about whether she would sign or veto the legislation.