Only 15% of available land owned by the government was leased to oil companies. Photo courtesy of Unsplash
Dec. 10 (UPI) -- A report released Friday by the Government Accountability Office found that the Interior Department is wasting money on applications for land that isn't leased for oil and gas drilling.
The watchdog said that the Bureau of Land Management should consider charging oil and gas speculators to nominate public lands for sale.
The bureau manages about 700 million acres of minerals -- including stores of crude oil and natural gas -- owned by the federal government. It's responsible for holding sales of leased lands for energy development.
Proposals come in from oil companies and speculators. The bureau then reviews those proposals to see if the lands are appropriate for oil and gas development.
Between 2009 and 2019, only 20% of lands were offered for sale and only 15% were leased.
The federal workload to consider millions of acres of land is heavy lifting, the report stated.
Most of the 87 million acres of land nominated for leasing were never offered at auction, and of the 18 million auctioned, 4 million were never leased.
The BLM hasn't updated its application fees for more than 15 years, a move that has cost BLM staff time and money while they weigh offering proposed lands for lease.
The report suggests that BLM charge a fee to nominate lands -- a requirement that hasn't been visited since 2014 -- and perform regular reviews of its fee structure.
"Without doing so, BLM risks continuing to expend resources to process nominations that do not result in leases," the 60-page report states. "In addition, the agency may not strike the appropriate balance between encouraging nominations and controlling costs."
No comments:
Post a Comment