Lease

The Trump administration eliminated a series of Obama-era reforms to the Bureau of Land Management’s onshore oil and natural gas leasing program, including the use of master leasing plans (MLP), on the grounds that the reforms were duplicative and burdensome to the oil and gas industry.

Preliminary proceeds from Bureau of Land Management (BLM) oil and natural gas lease sales conducted last year totaled $360 million, an 86% increase over 2016’s total of $192.5 million, federal officials said.

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) found market resistance in its quarterly lease auction in Utah on Tuesday, selling only three of the nine parcels up for bid.

In the first lease sale covering the entire Gulf of Mexico (GOM) since 1983, the Lower Tertiary Trend, an intriguing deepwater play that has yielded big-time discoveries, captured most of the attention.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) is proposing to reduce the royalty rate for Gulf of Mexico (GOM) oil and natural gas leases sold during the August federal sale to 12.5% from 18.75%.

Pledging to make the Interior Department “a better neighbor in the new Trump administration,” Secretary Ryan Zinke issued a secretarial order (SO) on Thursday that calls for streamlining the permitting process for drilling on federal lands.

The Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) this week awarded 153 tracts to companies that bid in March to explore for oil and natural gas in the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), but 10 high bids were rejected.

At the first auction of federal offshore leases in Alaska’s Cook Inlet in nearly a decade, Hilcorp Alaska LLC submitted bids of more than $3 million on Wednesday, according to the Interior Department’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM).

In some of the most remote areas of the state for oil/natural gas development, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management (BLM) operations in northwest Colorado on Thursday sold oil/gas leases covering 63,268 acres, garnering $1.24 million in revenues.