Big oil bids at offshore Gulf of Mexico auction

Big oil companies including Chevron and ExxonMobil are among the 33 companies that participated at federal auction oil leases in federal waters of the Gulf of Mexico generating around US $198 million.

The leases were abiding with  the U.S. District Court’s preliminary injunction, that forced the U.S. administration to lease those areas. The government still appeals the decision according to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. 

The Biden-Harris administration is continuing its comprehensive review of its offshore and onshore oil and gas leasing programs and initiating reforms.

“Moving forward, BOEM will use updated greenhouse gas emission models to take substitution impacts and foreign oil consumption into account, resulting in the most robust projections ever of the climate impacts of offshore lease sales, as well as analyzing the social cost of carbon to better understand the true impacts of fossil fuel leasing decisions,” said the bureau which added that about 1.7 million acres were sold.

The U.S. is among the countries that signed the Glasgow agreement to cut on fossil fuels emissions. 

According to the news agency Reuters, Chevron was the auction's biggest spender with US $47.1 million, then followed by Anadarko, which is owned by Occidental Petroleum Corp., BP and Royal Dutch Shell.