U.S. to offer oil leases in Alaska NPR-A this fall

By Yereth Rosen

ANCHORAGE (Reuters) - The Bureau of Land Management said on Wednesday it will hold an oil lease sale this autumn for acreage in the National Petroleum Reserve of Alaska that the government says could hold 8.4 billion barrels of recoverable crude.

The move comes amid a push in Washington to boost domestic oil drilling to help wean the United States off its dependence on foreign shipments.

"We believe that the area within the NPR-A and the area opened by this decision can provide more than 8 billion barrels of oil to help us share our future supplies with the citizens of the United States," Assistant Interior Secretary Steve Allred told reporters at a news conference.

"We believe that the opening and the sale, which will occur in October, will tend to reduce pressure on prices ... and encourage us to increase supply of oil and natural gas from resources we have here at home."

The sale, authorized in a formal record of decision signed Wednesday, will include some 2.6 million acres in the northeast section of the NPR-A and an unknown amount in the northwest section, the BLM said during a news conference.

The lease sale will be the fifth in the past decade offered in the Indiana-sized NPRA and will make available land that had been offered in the previous lease sales, which date back to 1999.

Those lease sales have yielded a total of about $236 million in high bids from various companies. Roughly 3 million acres are currently under lease within the petroleum reserve, according to the BLM.

Tom Lonnie, the BLM's Alaska state director, said Anadarko Petroleum Corp (APC.N) and another company, Renaissance Alaska, have actively inquired about the planned fall lease sale, and he expects participation from other companies that are active in the reserve, such as ConocoPhillips (COP.N), Pioneer Natural Resources (PXD.N) (PXD.N), Petro-Canada (PCA.TO) (PCZ.N) and Talisman Energy (TLM.TO) (TLM.N) unit FEX L.P.