With less than one week on the job, newly-confirmed Secretary of the Interior, Ryan Zinke announced that BOEM will offer 73,000,000 acres of lease space located in the Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas exploration. Proposed Lease Sale 249 is currently scheduled for August 16, 2017, and will include all unleased areas of federal waters in the GOM. The sale will be livestreamed from New Orleans.
This sale is the first under the new Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2017-2022 (Five Year Program). The plan includes two GOM lease sales each year, including all available blocks in the combined Western, Central, and Eastern GOM. It is estimated that there are approximately 211 million to 1.118 billion barrels of oil and 0.547-4.424 trillion cubic feet of gas available for production in those available leases. The available land for lease includes approximately 13,725 unleased blocks located between 3-230 miles offshore, and ranging in depth between 9-11,115 feet of water.
Excluded from the lease sale are blocks subject to the Congressional moratorium established by the Gulf of Mexico Energy Security Act of 2006; blocks that are adjacent to or beyond the U.S. Exclusive Economic Zone in the area known as the northern portion of the Eastern Gap; and whole blocks and partial blocks within the current boundary of the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary. The full text of BOEM’s press release can be found here.
The current Five Year Program [2012-2017] will have its final lease sale today, March 22, 2017, which includes approximately 48 million acres off the coast of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama comprised of 9,118 blocks. The sale will be livestreamed started at 9 am via BOEM’s website.
