Interior Department Announces Region-wide Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale

Oil rig GettyImages-832605574

On July 12, in support of President Trump’s America First Offshore Energy Strategy, Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt announced that the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will offer approximately 78 million acres offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida for oil and gas exploration and development. Scheduled for Augist 15, 2018, Lease Sale 251 will include “all available unleased areas in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico,” the Department of the Interior’s press release reports.
 
“A strong offshore energy program supports tens of thousands of well-paying jobs and provides the affordable and reliable energy Americans need to heat homes, fuel our cars, and power our economy,” Bernhardt explained.
 
Lease Sale 251 will be the third offshore sale under the National Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2017-2022. There will be ten Gulf offshore lease sales in all, with two held each year each year throughout the combined 160 million acres of the Western, Central, and Eastern Gulf of Mexico Planning Areas.
 
Interior estimates the Gulf of Mexico OCS contains “about 48 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and 141 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered technically recoverable gas.” The Final Notice of Sale for Lease Sale 251 will be available for inspection in the Federal Register at: http://go.cei.org/e/287682/r-public-inspection-index-html/dvr2g/174536131 on July 13, 2018, and will be published in the Federal Register on July 16, 2018.​