Several US Bureau of Land Management state offices resumed preparations for scheduled oil and gas lease sales soon after the 35-day federal government partial shutdown ended. Lease sales in Alaska, Wyoming, Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Montana, and South Dakota are in various stages, but all are moving ahead, OGJ has found.
Perhaps the highest-profile upcoming federal onshore oil and gas lease sale will be for parcels on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain. BLM scheduled public meetings in seven Alaska communities and one in Washington, DC, during February about the proposed lease sale’s draft environmental impact statement, which it issued on Dec. 21, 2018. It also extended the public comment period to Mar. 13.
“We received requests from Alaska communities and tribes as well as nonprofit organizations from across the nation asking for additional time and meeting locations,” Asst. Interior Secretary for Land and Minerals Management Joe Balash said.
BLM’s Wyoming office in Cheyenne has scheduled a supplementary lease sale from Feb. 25 through Mar. 1 in addition to its first-quarter lease sale on Mar. 19-20. Its Utah office in Salt Lake City is preparing a two-day online lease sale for Mar. 25-26 and initiated a 30-day protest period on Jan. 30 after the 30-day public comment period on five environmental documents closed on Dec. 17, 2018.
The agency’s New Mexico office in Santa Fe, meanwhile, has scheduled a regular quarterly lease sale for Mar. 28, with a Feb. 11-20 protest period. US House Natural Resources Committee Chairman Raul M. Grijalva (D-Ariz.) and other committee Democrats said on Jan. 31 that it would include land adjacent to the Chaco Culture National Historic Park, an ancestral homeland and sacred site for many Southwest tribes, a center of ancestral Puebloan culture, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
BLM and the US Bureau of Indian Affairs are preparing an as-yet-incomplete management plan update for the region to ensure tribal consultation and the appropriate consideration of cultural resources, they indicated.
In Billings, the agency’s Montana-Dakotas State Office released a notice on Jan. 31 that it will hold a lease sale starting Mar. 25 for 35 parcels totaling about 167,113 acres in 15 Montana counties and in Fall River County, SD. The notice’s publication started a 30-day protest period which closes at 4:30 p.m. MST on Mar. 3.
BLM’s Colorado State Office in Lakewood said on Jan. 29 that it is seeking comments on its plan to offer 4,804 acres on federal tracts managed by its Royal Gorge field office in an upcoming competitive lease sale in June. Comments during an initial scoping period are due on Feb. 12, although the public will have another opportunity to comment during a later 15-day review of draft environmental assessment documents.
Colorado’s state government receives 48% of the proceeds from each federal lease sale there, with the remainder going to the US government, BLM’s state office said. In Fiscal 2017, oil and gas development on public lands the US Department of the Interior agency manages in Colorado contributed $5 billion to the state’s economy, it said. Statewide, 25,219 jobs are tied to oil and gas development on BLM-managed public lands in Colorado, it added.
Contact Nick Snow at [email protected].