August 15 lease sale to be livestreamed from New Orleans.

The U.S. Department of the Interior’s Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) has scheduled a region-wide oil and gas lease sale for all available unleased areas in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico (GOM), BOEM announced late Thursday.

“We look forward to this important sale, as the Gulf of Mexico continues to be the crown jewel of the Outer Continental Shelf,” Deputy Secretary of the Interior David Bernhardt said in a written statement. “A strong offshore energy program supports tens of thousands of well-paying jobs and provides the affordable and reliable energy Americans need to heat homes, fuel our cars and power our economy.”

According to BOEM, Lease Sale 251 will offer approximately 78 million acres offshore Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida. The bureau stated that it plans to livestream the event – scheduled for August 15 – from New Orleans. The OCS acreage up for bid encompasses 14,622 unleased blocks three to 231 miles offshore in the Gulf’s Western, Central and Eastern planning areas in water depths ranging from nine to more than 11,115 feet (three to 3,400 meters), BOEM stated. The bureau estimates the 160 million-acre Gulf OCS holds approximately 48 billion barrels of undiscovered technically recoverable oil and 141 trillion cubic feet of undiscovered technically recoverable natural gas.

Next month’s lease sale will be the third of 10 such region-wide GOM auctions under the National Outer Continental Shelf Oil and Gas Leasing Program for 2017-2022, BOEM continued. BOEM plans to hold two GOM lease sales each year under the program and will include , it stated. In addition, BOEM pointed out that fiscal terms under the program include:

• a 12.5-percent royalty rate for leases in less than 200 meters of water depth
• an 18.75-percent royalty rate for all other leases issued in accordance with the sale.