The US Department of the Interior (DoI) has announced the Lease Sale 250, which will offer 76.9 million acres in lease sale for oil and gas exploration and development in the Gulf of Mexico (GoM) federal waters offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The proposed lease sale is scheduled to take place in March 2018 and it will include all available unleased areas in the GoM's Outer Continental Shelf (OCS); it encompasses 14,375 unleased blocks, located from 3 to 230 miles offshore (approximately 4.8 km to 370 km) in the GoM's western, central and eastern planning areas.
The US Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) estimates that the US nationwide OCS holds around 90 Gbl of undiscovered recoverable oil and 327 tcf (9,259 bcm) of undiscovered recoverable gas reserves, of which over 48 Gbl of oil and 141 tcf (3,992 bcm) for the Gulf of Mexico OCS only.
The Lease Sale 250 takes places under the framework of the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2017-2022. The last sale, namely the Lease Sale 249 (August 2017), received US$121m in high bids.
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