REUTERS: The Trump administration moved ahead with oil and gas lease sales in four Western states on Tuesday, bucking criticism from taxpayer advocates who say the auctions should be postponed because of a meltdown in energy prices.
The Bureau of Land Management is offering more than 210,000 acres for leasing via online auctions in Wyoming, Nevada and Montana on Tuesday, and Colorado on Thursday.The largest sale is for 105 parcels covering 118,292 acres in Wyoming, the top U.S. state for gas production on federal lands and the second-biggest for oil production, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
In Nevada, BLM is offering 45 parcels covering 70,110 acres and in Montana it auctioned eight parcels covering 5,180 acres . All eight parcels had sold in Montana by mid-morning on Tuesday, three for the minimum price of US$2 an acre and four others for under US$10 an acre. The highest price was US$102-an-acre for a parcel in Richland County, according to online marketplace EnergyNet.
Last week, the United States held an auction for oil and gas leases in the Gulf of Mexico that generated the lowest total of high bids for any domestic offshore auction since 2016. Earlier this month, BLM held a lease sale in Utah that received mostly minimum bids of US$2 an acre. "In this environment, it is impossible for the American taxpayer to expect anywhere near a fair return on oil and gas leases," Taxpayers for Common Sense, a federal budget watchdog organization, and Conservatives for Responsible Stewardship, a non-profit conservation group, said in a joint statement last week.
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