U.S. Secretary of the Interior Sally Jewell will travel to New Orleans on Wednesday, March 18, 2015 to attend and open bids at an oil and gas lease sale offering 41.2 million acres for exploration and development in the Central Planning Area offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
The results of the sale will be announced later in the morning during a media teleconference with Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) Director Abigail Ross Hopper and Regional Director John Rodi.
BOEM estimates the sale could result in the production of 460 to 890 million barrels of oil, and 1.9 trillion cubic feet to 3.9 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. When bidding closed today, 35 companies had submitted 195 bids on 169 blocks offered in the sale. A map of the location of tracts receiving bids will be available tomorrow on the BOEM website.
Lease Sale 235 is the seventh offshore sale under the Administration’s Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2012-2017 (Five Year Program). The previous six sales offered 60 million acres and garnered $2.4 billion in high bids and awarded 877 leases. The Five Year Program makes available all offshore areas with the highest resource potential and includes 75 percent of the nation’s undiscovered, technically recoverable offshore oil and gas resources.