More than 4.8M acres under oil and gas leases — report

Posted by egable on May 29th, 2008 filed in Energy development

More than 4.8 million acres of public lands in Colorado are leased for oil and gas development, but less than 1.4 million acres are under production, according to a new Wilderness Society analysis of Interior Department data. From 2001 through 2007, the Bureau of Land Management, which manages federal minerals, approved 2,909 drilling permit applications and leased nearly 2.6 million acres, the Wilderness Society found.

While the report is aimed at showing the rush for drilling permits under the Bush administration, much of the drilling boom in Colorado is not occurring on federal lands. Indeed, TWS found that only about 765 applications for drilling permits were approved on federal lands in 2007, compared with 5,500 on state and private lands.