The four federal agencies preparing to designate energy corridors on Federal lands in 11 Western States for electricity transmission and oil, natural gas and hydrogen pipelines Friday released a map showing preliminary corridors.

The informational map was developed using comments received during a public scoping period in the fall of 2005, and offers an update on progress in the identification of potential corridors and an opportunity for public comment on work to date.

The Department of Energy (DOE), the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the U.S. Forest Service (USFS) and the Department of Defense (DOD) are preparing a draft programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) to identify the impacts of designating energy corridors on Federal lands in the 11 states, as directed by Congress in Section 368 of the Energy Policy Act of 2005.

Energy corridors represent areas where pipelines and transmission lines may be built in the future. Designating corridors helps minimize the time it takes to site and approve projects, as well as reducing environmental effects and conflicts with other uses of federal lands, the agencies said. Individual projects proposed for these corridors will be analyzed further under the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) for their environmental impacts.

An electronic version of the map, as well as additional information about corridor designation and the PEIS, is available on the project website: https://corridoreis.anl.gov. The website also provides a way to submit comments electronically.

Comments and suggestions about the preliminary corridors described in the map are welcome and should be submitted to the following address no later than July 10: Julia Souder, U.S. Department of Energy 8h-033, 1000 Independence Avenue, S.W.; Washington, D.C. 20585.

The opportunity to comment on the preliminary map is in addition to the opportunity for public comment on the draft PEIS, which the agencies expect to release later this year.

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