DIMANCHE

by Shay Sokol

The feds haven't gotten to the bottom of the Big Oozy yet, but they threw oil companies itching to go back to the bottom of the Gulf a bone yesterday, allowing the black gold miners to bid on new tracts of land for drilling in the same area of the body of water as the Macondo well for the first time since the Deepwater Horizon blew. Centered at the Superdome, the first offshore oil lease sale in the Central Gulf since 2010 brought 56 offshore energy companies to submit 593 bids on 2.4 million acres.

The Department of Interior and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management oversaw the lease sale, where a total of 39 million acres of the Gulf were up for grabs. The bids received totaled about $2.6 million, according to the Department of Interior’s press release.

While the oil industry and the Obama administration laud this sale as our country becoming less dependent on foreign oil and bringing more jobs to the Gulf Coast, environmental groups like the Louisiana Bucket Brigadeare worried more disasters are to come because of what they say is a lack of safety reform. The Bucket Brigade had monitors on hand at yesterday's sale to show the oil companies that the eyes of the public were on them.

The Obama administration has increased domestic energy production in what is believed to be the most profitable region to produce oil and gas in the world – the Gulf of Mexico – due to higher taxes on drilling in foreign nations.

The Department of the Interior’s press release quoted Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar at yesterday’s lease sale as saying, “When it comes to domestic production, the President has made clear he is committed to expanding oil and natural gas production safely and responsibly, and today’s sale is just the latest example of his administration delivering on that commitment. The numbers speak for themselves: every year the President has been in office, domestic oil and gas production has increased, foreign imports of oil have decreased, and we are currently producing more oil than any time in the past eight years.”

Even though their name was a dirty word around here a couple years ago, BP showed that they weren't leaving the Gulf anytime soon. The British oil giant was the winning bidder on 43 leases to drill in the Central Gulf, where their Macondo well exploded in 2010. 11 workers were killed by the blast, and 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled.

The highest bid on a tract was $157,111,000, submitted by Statoil Gulf of Mexico LLC for Mississippi Canyon, Block 718. Shell (official sponsor of Jazz Fest) submitted the highest total amount in bids – $406,594,560 on 24 tracts, according to the Department of Interior’s website.

Among the 10 highest bidders were Chevron Corp, Exxon Mobil, Apache Corp, LLOG Exploration Offshore LLC, Stone Energy Corp, Noble Energy Inc, and Conoco Phillips, according to the DOI.

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management will evaluate each bid to ensure the public receives the fair market value before a lease is awarded. Awarded lessees will have to comply with a series of environmental stipulations, and will be subject to federal observation, the feds said.