Five companies submitted winning bids for oil and gas leases in the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska on the North Slope.


The winning bids, totaling almost $31 million, cover 150 tracts on approximately 1.7 million acres of the 23-million-acre reserve. There are already 335 leases totaling 3.1 million acres in the federal reserve.


Winning bids in the sale hosted by the Alaska Bureau of Land Management were received from Anadarko Petroleum Corp., ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc., Petro-Canada Alaska Inc., Fex LP and Petro-Hunt LLC. The highest bid of $642,926—or $40.40 per acre—was offered by Petro-Hunt LLC for tract D-008, which covers land from the northwest and northeast planning areas on both sides of the Ikpikpuk River.


“The companies that submitted bids today have demonstrated their interest in developing new sources of oil and gas that will reduce our nation’s dependency on imported oil,” says BLM-Alaska state director Tom Lonnie.


The state will receive 50% of the bid receipts, or $15.5 million.


The lease sale offered 450 tracts totaling 4.8 million acres within the northwest and northeast planning areas of the reserve. The U.S. Geological Survey estimated in 2002 that the entire petroleum reserve could contain as much as 9.3 billion barrels of mean technically recoverable oil and 59.7 trillion cubic feet of mean technically recoverable gas.
—OilandGasInvestor.com

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