Oil-and-gas auction in Utah draws few, low bids
By PAUL FOY
AP Business Writer
The Associated Press
SALT LAKE CITY
Bids at a government oil-and-gas lease auction Tuesday were few and stingy as participants blamed depressed fuel prices for their lack of interest—and fumed about the sabotage of the previous land sale.
Barely half of the 98 parcels sold—more than 76,000 acres of land in southern and eastern Utah—some for as little as $2 an acre.
“Given the current economic conditions—lower demand for oil products—there’s few if any of those parcels bought today that will be drilled this year,” said David Terry, a land agent who spent the most of any bidder on a drilling parcel. He spent $58,000 for 930 acres in Utah’s southeast corner on behalf of an oil or gas company he declined to identify.
“It’s a highly speculative business.” he said. “There was fewer than five drilling companies there out of 31 registered bidders. The rest of those bidders are speculating.”
Some bidders were still angry over a December auction that was first foiled by an environmental activist and then partly scrapped by new Interior Secretary Ken Salazar because some parcels were too close to national parks.
“Everybody’s pretty upset,” said Lane Lasrich, one of Tuesday’s bidders. “Basically, there were legally offered parcels, and he decides arbitrarily to pull them.”
The auction, the first under the administration of President Barack Obama, raised $772,293; about half of that goes to Utah.
The sale was held under the watchful eye of an armed guard. The Bureau of Land Management was trying to avoid a repeat of Dec. 19 when a college student grabbed a bidder’s paddle, drove up prices and won 22,000 acres of land for $1.7 million—money he had neither the means nor the intention of paying.
The student called it an act of civil disobedience to protect Utah’s redrock country. The U.S. attorney’s office is considering criminal charges.
The BLM pulled 46,000 acres from Tuesday’s auction list because of protest by the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, which cited threats to big-game and trout habitat across the mountain ranges of Utah’s west desert.
“The fact we had to protest this two times in a row shows there is a problem,” said Joel Webster, the conservation group’s associate director, who said it wasn’t opposed to drilling if operations are restricted to safeguard wildlife.
——
On the Net:
Utah state office of the Bureau of Land Management:
