Oil and Gas Development on Federal Lands
The federal government owns rights to about 700 million acres of onshore mineral resources, including oil and natural gas in the United States. That is about 30% of the lands in the United States. As of the end of September 2020, over 26.6 million acres of these lands were leased to corporations and individuals for oil and gas development. Wyoming, New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Montana, and Nevada have the largest amount of land leased in the Continental United States*.
Rocky Mountain Wild works with a coalition of organizations across the Rocky Mountain West that monitors oil and gas leasing in those states. Oil and gas development compromises our public lands and waters, changes and fragments wildlife habitats, threatens irreplaceable cultural resources and sacred sites, and risks our health and outdoor legacy. We work to stop leasing that would harm wildlife and wild lands. We have been directly involved in the deferral of over 2 million acres of public land from oil and gas development.
Inflation Reduction Act of 2022
On August 16, 2022, President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act into law, marking the most significant action Congress has taken on clean energy and climate change in the nation’s history. The Inflation Reduction Act includes provisions to take immediate action on the climate crisis, including common sense oil and gas leasing reforms that will reduce reckless speculation on lands with little potential for production, including charging fair rates for leasing on public lands.
Rocky Mountain Wild tracks proposals for oil and gas leasing as the lease sales start up again. For state specific lease sale information, visit our web pages for
Resources
- Poster Map of Oil and Gas Development in Colorado, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming
- Federal Oil and Gas Leasing geospatial data is viewable on the Bureau of Land Management’s Mineral & Land Records System (MLRS) Research Map. Rocky Mountain Wild created a GIS snapshot of this data on 6/15/2023 and it is available as a zipped shapefile*. Extracts for states in the Rocky Mountain Region are available in this Google Drive Folder.
- For all proposed lease sales in Colorado, Montana, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, Rocky Mountain Wild performed its Assessment of Biological Impact (ABI) screen, creating a spreadsheet that shows conflicts between the proposed parcels and important wildlife, wilderness and other resource values. These spreadsheets and geospatial data for the proposed parcels are archived in the following Google Drive folders:
- Upcoming Lease Sale Tracker (summary of lease sales and resource conflicts)
*Existing leases spatial data from the Bureau of Land Management as of 5/10/2023. Data was modified by Rocky Mountain Wild by removing data with the poorest quality (including all parcels in Texas), changing the projection, adding data from the BLM Land & Mineral System Reports as of 6/14/2023, and removing leases no longer authorized as of 6/14/2023.