Oregon Public Broadcasting

The Bureau of Land Management will open bidding Thursday for oil and gas leases on more than 5000 acres of public land in Oregon.   Pete Springer reports. 

The leases are on three parcels of land in Jefferson County within the Crooked River National Grassland. 

It’s highly unlikely oil will be discovered, though.  That’s because Oregon doesn’t have the correct age and type of rock where oil is generally found.

In fact, we don’t have any oil wells in Oregon at all.  We do have 97 natural gas wells, but none of those are on BLM land, which makes up roughly a quarter of the state.

So why sell leases to look for natural gas on public land?

Maya Fuller is a spokeswoman for the BLM.

She says it’s tied to the Energy Policy Act of 2005.  That federal legislation was meant to head off an energy crunch by mandating development of domestic sources.

Maya Fuller “And that’s a whole variety of types of energy that you know, includes geothermal, wind, solar, the gamut of what kind of, what produces energy.”

Minimum bids for the oil and gas leases start at $2 an acre.