Interior

The Interior Department’s Office of Natural Resources Revenue (ONRR) said Tuesday that it penalized Chesapeake Energy Corp. $765,000 for “knowing or willful submission of inaccurate information” on its oil and natural gas royalty reports.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar on Friday announced the department’s final plan for encouraging research, development and demonstration (RD&D) of oil shale and tar sands resources on more than 800,000 acres of Bureau of Land Management (BLM) lands in three western states.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Tuesday released its first-ever rapid ecoregional assessment (REA), which takes a broad look at the ecology of the Colorado Plateau.

The Interior Department is offering 38.6 million acres offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama in the Central Gulf of Mexico (GOM) Lease Sale 227 to be held in March. The sale, which could potentially result in almost 4 Tcf of natural gas production and nearly 1 billion bbl of oil production. The sale is the second in the Obama administration’s 2012-2017 Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) program and would be the first of five Central GOM lease sales to be held under the program (see NGI, July 2, 2012).

Four environmental groups have filed a lawsuit against the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to reduce the amount of natural gas drilling approved for Gasco Energy Inc. in Utah’s Uinta Basin.

Four environmental groups have filed suit against the Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) seeking to reduce the amount of drilling approved for Gasco Energy Inc. in Utah’s remote Uinta Basin shale formation.

Environmentalists have filed a lawsuit in Washington, DC, challenging the Interior Department’s final 2012-2017 plan for Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and natural gas leasing, which focuses primarily on the the Gulf of Mexico and potentially offshore areas in Alaska.

The latest Interior Department Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed plan on oil shale and oil sands leasing on western lands has come under attack from the chairman of a prominent House energy subcommittee.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Tuesday announced that it will hold an oil and natural gas auction on Nov. 7 in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska (NPR-A), its second in less than a year, offering producers 400 tracts and an estimated 4.5 million acres to explore.