ALLENTOWN — Pennsylvania environmental regulators say they spend as little as 35 minutes reviewing each of the thousands of applications for natural gas well permits they get each year from drillers intent on tapping the state’s lucrative and vast Marcellus Shale reserves.

And the regulators say they do not give any additional scrutiny to requests to drill near high-quality streams and rivers even though the waterways are protected by state and federal law.

Staffers in the state Department of Environmental Protection testified behind closed doors last month as part of a lawsuit filed by residents and environmental groups over a permit that DEP issued for an exploratory gas well in northeastern Pennsylvania, less than a half-mile from the Delaware River and about 300 feet from a pristine stream.

Reporting by the AP suggests that applications are rubber-stamped, rushed through with little scrutiny and rarely rejected. The staffers’ statements indicate that DEP regulators are overburdened — and possibly ignoring environmental laws — as they struggle to deal with an unprecedented drilling boom.

The agency has denied few requests to drill in the Marcellus Shale formation, the world’s second-largest gas field. Of the 7,019 applications that DEP has processed since 2005, only 31 have been rejected — less than one-half of one percent.

“Even those of us who are skeptics of the DEP, I think we all want to assume that they’re doing the basics. And they’re really just not,” said Jordan Yeager, a plaintiffs’ attorney who is challenging a drilling permit.

The agency declined to comment about any aspect of its permit review process, even to answer general questions.

But the depositions of four DEP staffers responsible for processing permits — taken in late March and filed with a regional water agency this week — show:

• The agency doesn’t consider potential impacts on legally protected high-quality watersheds, beyond checking that wells meet minimum setbacks.

• Staffers don’t consider whether proposed gas wells comply with municipal or regional zoning and planning laws.

• They don’t consider the cumulative impact of wide-scale development of wells in a concentrated area.