The U.S. Minerals Management Service (MMS), which this week issued the final details for the lease sale in September offshore Alaska, is facing growing criticism from Canadian officials, who claim that thousands of acres set for auction are actually owned by Canada. The sale area extends from the eastern Canadian border to just west of Barrow, encompassing about 9.4 million acres offshore Alaska’s northern coast on the Beaufort Sea (see Daily GPI, Aug. 22).

In its Federal Register notice on Thursday (03-21464), the MMS’s Final Notice of Sale 186 explains in a note that “four blocks in the easternmost Beaufort Sea area are subject to jurisdictional claims by both the United States and Canada.” Those four blocks encompass about 16,000 acres of the coming auction.

This week, while Canada Natural Resources Minister Herb Dhaliwal was in Detroit for a meeting on the recent North American electricity blackout, he said he remained confident that the United States would do the right thing and avoid completing transactions on the disputed offshore lands. “It’s a disputed boundary,” he told the Toronto Globe. “There has never been any leases committed to this area, and we expect the United States will be consistent with that and, because it’s a disputed area, there won’t be leases put on that.”

According to MMS spokeswoman Robin Cacy, the blocks, located in the Mackenzie Canyon region, have been in dispute since they were first offered by the MMS for an auction in the 1980s. At that time, MMS leased some of the blocks in the territory, but reimbursed Canada after it claimed sovereignty.

For the Sept. 24 auction, the MMS plans to take separate, sealed bids on disputed blocks 6201, 6251, 6301 and 6361. On or before the auction, MMS will determine whether “it is in the best interest of the United States either to open bids for these blocks or to return these bids unopened.” The MMS will not disclose the names of the bidders on these blocks unless the bids are opened.

For more information on the scheduled MMS sale, visit the web site at www.mms.gov.

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