Western GOM sale has +$337M in high bids

The Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management received $337,688,341 in high bids at its Western Gulf of Mexico oil and gas lease sale, held Dec. 14 in New Orleans. Twenty companies submitted 241 bids on 191 tracts, more than a million acres offshore Texas. The sum of all bids received was $712,725,998.

There were six companies with interests in Alaska among the top 10 bidders at the sale:

• Top bidder ConocoPhillips had 75 high bids, a total of $157,816,740, including the highest bid on a block, $103,200,000 for NG15-05 Keathley Canyon 95;

• ExxonMobil was No. 2, with 50 high bids totaling $63,293,750;

• BP had 11 high bids totaling $27,458,809;

• Anadarko had seven high bids totaling $19,317,210;

• Shell had three high bids totaling $4,951,858; and

• Apache had three high bids totaling $1,693,927.

This is the first lease sale BOEM has held since the Deepwater Horizon explosion.

“Offshore drilling will never be risk free, but over the last 19 months we have moved quickly and aggressively with the most significant oil and gas reforms in U.S. history to make it safer and more environmentally responsible,” Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a release on the sale. “Today’s sale is another step in ensuring the safe and responsible development of the nation’s offshore energy resources.”

BOEM said lease terms included escalating rental rates to encourage faster exploration and development. BOEM also increased its minimum bid requirement to $100 per acre, up from $37.50 in previous sales, after historical analysis showed that leases with high bids of less than $100 an acre “have experienced virtually no exploration and development activities.”

—Petroleum News