Public Land News

For centuries, riverside communities, including the "quilombola" descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped from plantations and ranches, have shared Xingu Island in Brazil's Amazon Basin.Its inhabitants live in brightly painted wooden houses overlooking rivers where small boats crisscross between islands and Abaetetuba city on the mainland to trade fish, seeds and fruits gathered from the Amazon forest in their backyard.In 2016, however, strangers docked on Xingu Island, in Para state…

Guyana has called for proposals to design, finance and build a 30,000-barrel-per-day (bpd) oil refinery, the first for the South American country as it becomes a force in crude oil production. Construction work on the facility, to be located on public land near the Berbice river, is expected to begin by the first half of 2023 with project completion two years after. Requests are due in mid-December. An Exxon Mobil-led consortium has ramped up oil and gas output to almost 400,000 bpd this year, a rapid increase for a country that only inaugurated crude production in 2019.

The land along the road into Berbera is barren and empty. Somaliland's small, rusty Gulf of Aden port which for centuries made the town prosperous rises suddenly out of the ground as the road hits the coast. The crumbling town has languished for decades, but its fortunes look set to change following a multi-million dollar deal to revamp the port which has triggered a rush to buy land. Berbera, along the coast from Djibouti, has been a backwater since 1991 when Somaliland broke away from Somalia following a bloody civil war. The town's buildings, some dating back to the Ottoman era, stand neglected. Unemployment is rampant, exacerbated by a devastating drought that has decimated livestock, a backbone of the export economy.

The U.S. Department of Interior said it plans to make a major announcement on Thursday about energy resources on the U.S. Arctic Outer Continental Shelf.   Officials plan to discuss the latest announcement on a series of reforms related to the production of energy resources on public land in a press call at 3:30 p.m. EDT (1930 GMT), the department said in a statement. (Reporting by Adam DeRose; Editing by Eric Walsh)

Bureau of Land Management (BLM) Director Neil Kornze today testified before the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee on a bill that would increase the efficiency of oil and gas permitting on public lands and coordination among agencies by continuing the BLM’s Oil and Gas Pilot Office program. During his testimony on S. 2440, the BLM Permit Processing Improvement Act of 2014, Kornze described the key role pilot offices play in supporting the Administration’s All-of-the-Above energy strategy to create jobs and reduce the nation’s dependence on foreign oil. “The Obama Administration has made it a priority to permit environmentally responsible oil and gas development on the nation’s public lands,” Kornze said.

The White House likes to claim a share of the credit for the drilling revolution that has transformed North America's energy production and security. Except the revolution has largely taken place on private rather than public land, and energy producers feel frustrated about the numerous obstacles and long delays in obtaining permission to drill in areas directly controlled by the administration. "Crude oil production has grown each year President Barack Obama has been in office to its highest level in 17 years," the Council of Economic Advisors wrote back in the summer of 2013. "Government-funded research supplemented private industry's work to develop the technology that sparked the boom," the council explained ("Reducing America's dependence on foreign oil", Aug. 29, 2013).

The Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, Regulation and Enforcement (BOEMRE) announced today that it has awarded a $1,045,400 Coastal Impact Assistance Program (CIAP) grant to the Mississippi Department of Marine Resources (MDMR). The grant will provide funding for the acquisition of the Charnley-Norwood Property, a parcel of waterfront land in Ocean Springs, Miss. The proposal will include the restoration of an historic century-old structure on the property, as well as the development of a future public land use plan to restore the waterfront parcel to a community green space and public museum. Created by the Energy Policy Act of 2005, CIAP provides funding to the six Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) oil and gas producing states to conserve and protect the coastal environment.

1819-The Revenue cutter Dallas seized a vessel laden with lumber that had been unlawfully cut from public land in one of the first recorded instances of a revenue cutter enforcing an environmental law. 1837-Congress authorized President "to cause any suitable number of public vessels, adapted to the purpose, to cruise upon the coast, in the severe portion of the season, and to afford aid to distressed navigators." This was the first statute authorizing activities in the field of maritime safety, thus interjecting the national government into the field of lifesaving for the first time. Although revenue cutters were specifically mentioned, the performance of this duty was imposed primarily upon the Revenue Marine Service and quickly became one of its major activities.

1819-The Revenue cutter Dallas seized a vessel laden with lumber that had been unlawfully cut from public land in one of the first recorded instances of a revenue cutter enforcing an environmental law. 1837-Congress authorized President "to cause any suitable number of public vessels, adapted to the purpose, to cruise upon the coast, in the severe portion of the season, and to afford aid to distressed navigators." This was the first statute authorizing activities in the field of maritime safety, thus interjecting the national government into the field of lifesaving for the first time. Although revenue cutters were specifically mentioned, the performance of this duty was imposed primarily upon the Revenue Marine Service and quickly became one of its major activities.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced the Department will hold an oil and natural gas lease sale for the Central Gulf of Mexico Outer Continental Shelf that will offer nearly 36 million acres and could produce up to 1.3 billion barrels of oil and 5.4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. “As we build a comprehensive energy strategy for our nation, we are moving ahead both with environmentally-responsible renewable energy development on public lands and appropriate oil and natural gas exploration and development onshore and offshore,” said Secretary Salazar. Interior’s Minerals Management Service has proposed that oil and gas Lease Sale 213 for the Central Gulf of Mexico Planning Area be held March 17, 2010.

A sale of federal oil and natural gas leases for the Western Gulf of Mexico attracted $115,466,321 million in high bids, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar announced. To date this year, the department has offered 55 million acres of U.S. public land – onshore and offshore – for oil and gas development, generating more than $875m in revenues. “The responsible development of oil and gas resources on U.S. public lands is an integral part of President Obama’s comprehensive energy strategy for the nation,” Secretary Salazar said. Western Gulf of Mexico Oil and Gas Lease Sale 210, held in New Orleans by Interior’s Minerals Management Service, received 189 bids on 162 federal Outer Continental Shelf tracts from 27 companies. The sum of all bids received totaled $145,186,365.00.

Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar appointed Liz Birnbaum, an attorney with two decades of federal government and private sector experience in energy and environmental policy, as Director of the Department’s Minerals Management Service. The appointment does not require Senate confirmation. As Director of the Minerals Management Service, Birnbaum administers programs that ensure the effective management of renewable and traditional energy and mineral resources on the nation’s Outer Continental Shelf, including the environmentally safe exploration, development, and production of oil and natural gas, and the collection and distribution of revenues for minerals developed on federal and American Indian lands.

On the 15th anniversary of a million gallon oil spill that damaged the coastline of Puerto Rico, NOAA and partner organizations are celebrating the purchase of 152 acres to expand a coastal reserve near one of the areas hardest hit by the spill. NOAA, the commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and the Trust for Public Land announced that 152 acres east of San Juan have been added to the San Miguel Natural Reserve to help compensate the public for lost recreational beach use and injured natural resources for an extended period after the Berman Oil Spill on Jan. 7, 1994.

On the brink of the 21st century, a group of energy experts peered into the future of natural gas, and what they saw was quite promising. To satisfy growing demand, producers could crank out a third more natural gas over the next decade at "competitive prices." It could power the economy for decades to come. Or so said the National Petroleum Council in its 1999 report. But natural gas prices soon headed skyward, with prices charged by producers spiking late last year at nearly five times 1999 levels. This past winter, though starting off warm, saw the average gas-heating household spend a record $867, a 17 percent increase, according to federal data. As for that predicted robust supply, the country's annual gas output has strangely slipped by 3 percent over the past six years.