US government agency the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) will offer 48 million acres of central Gulf of Mexico waters for offshore oil and gas exploration at its next auction in March 2017.
Lease Sale 247 as it is called, will be the 12th and final sale for the Gulf under the five-year-plan for 2012-2017 of the administration of President Barack Obama.
The announcement comes at the end of a week I which the administration announced a permanent ban on offshore oil drilling in almost all of the US Arctic and in a big swathe off the Atlantic coast.
The area covered in Lease Sale 247 includes 9,118 blocks at depths ranging between 9 feet to 11,115 feet and between 3 miles and 230 miles offshore Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama.
This lease sale will be livestreamed online on March 22 at the BOEM website.
Part of the Department of the Interior, the BOEM was established in 2010 to manage the exploration and development of the country’s energy and mineral resources.
