Gulf oil lease 30-year record | Home | The Advocate — Baton Rouge, LA
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WASHINGTON — The federal government generated $1.74 billion Wednesday in high bids on oil-and-gas leases for 454 central Gulf of Mexico tracts, including 43 winning bids from BP.
The lease sale in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans was the largest Gulf lease sale since the 2010 BP oil rig explosion that killed 11 men and resulted in a three-month discharge of 4.9 million barrels of oil into the Gulf and along Louisiana’s coast.
Interior Department Secretary Ken Salazar said in a conference call after the lease sale that the event was the Gulf’s fourth-largest lease sale ever and included the single-largest winning bid in the Gulf in more than three decades.
The $157 million record bid was from Statoil, of Norway, for a tract in the central Gulf’s Mississippi Canyon that is south of Louisiana’s coastline, he said.
“This is a huge number relative of anything we’ve ever seen,” Salazar said of the lease sale.
The overall sale included nearly 600 bids from 48 companies on 454 tracts for deepwater drilling in the Gulf’s Outer Continental Shelf. Nearly 40 million total acres were put up for lease.
“What it does show is the Gulf is back,” Salazar said, adding that he participated in a flyover of the Gulf. “I saw no remnants of the oil and gas, which was so prevalent,” he said.
Salazar insisted that the lessons of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon disaster not be forgotten. He also toured Louisiana’s Breton National Wildlife Refuge and Delta National Wildlife Refuge and he touted the restoration of 1,200 acres of marshland thus far and the need for much more.
But Salazar and his boss, President Barack Obama, also are taking jabs for the lease sale this week from both the political right and left.
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