Locator: 50687B.
This was NOT on my bingo card: a record-setting oil and gas lease sale in the Dakotas. A record sale! I thought the Bakken was dead based on stories from the likes of The New York Times.
I used to track these quarterly sales but somewhere along the line the agency seemed to have made the site less user-friendly and it wasn't worth the time to try to sort it out.
The monthly "NDIC Hearing Dockets" are so much more helpful. And this month, particularly interesting. It seems every case was a) multi-section drilling unit; and, a multi-well pad, four to six wells.
But back to the BLM lease sale -- a record $44 million for 8,989 acres, or an average of $5,000 per acre.
Note also the significantly reduced federal onshore royalty rate -- making it more attractive for operators to operate.
