Going once, going twice, sold to ... no one.
On Thursday, the Bureau of Land Management auctioned off leases on more than 20,000 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling. The land, divided into 23 parcels, was offered at the minimum starting price, just $10 an acre, and could be leased indefinitely once oil and gas starts flowing.
But during the sale: crickets. Not a single parcel received a bid, and only two companies had even registered for the sale.
The sale reveals the limits of the Trump administration’s push to open more public land to oil and gas drilling. Simply put, many areas across the West with easily accessible oil are already developed.
“In general, everything that is really high value across the West that will ever produce oil has already been sold,” said Aaron Weiss, deputy director of the Center for Western Priorities, an environmental group, which criticized the auction.
The BLM did not directly respond to criticism about the sale.
The sale represents a renewed push by the Trump Administration to ramp up domestic oil and gas production, and achieve so-called “energy dominance.” The United States is already the world’s largest producer of crude oil.
Thursday's lease sale, or lack thereof, came on the heels of a previous auction in December, which yielded nearly $5 million in revenue for Colorado and the federal government. While that may seem significant, it did not meet the threshold set by President Trump’s landmark domestic policy law, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act. The law mandates that the BLM hold a replacement sale if a quarter or more of the acres offered for leasing receive no bids.
Thursday’s sale is just the second “replacement sale” to be offered by the agency since the OBBA became law. The BLM is required to offer land for leasing every three months across several Western states, including Colorado.
The same parcels ignored on Thursday also received no bids in December, demonstrating that those areas in Jackson, Moffat and Garfield counties may be undesirable for drilling.
“There are no oil and gas companies that think that it’s profitable to lease them, even at 10 bucks an acre,” Weiss said.
Other changes by the Trump Administration, meant to support increased drilling, include cutting the “royalty rate” on land, which determines how much producers are required to pay the government once oil and gas starts flowing.
Taxpayers for Common Sense, a nonpartisan budget group, estimated that Colorado and U.S. taxpayers would lose around $15.5 million in revenue from a September lease sale in the state, because of the reduced royalty rate on those leases.
The law also restarts non-competitive leasing, which means companies can purchase leases outside of the BLM auctions, and it fast-tracks how quickly land is offered up for leasing.
Environmental groups panned Thursday’s auction as a wasteful and inefficient burden for the BLM, an agency that is struggling with staffing and may see additional cuts in 2026.
“Today's so-called 'replacement sale' is a completely unnecessary burden on the short-staffed agency and makes it easier for oil companies to hoard our public lands for dirt cheap prices," said Jim Ramey, Colorado state director at The Wilderness Society.
While Thursday’s sale was a bust, there are more sales ahead. The BLM is poised to offer more than 250,000 acres of public lands for leasing across Colorado in the next six months, according to an analysis by the Center for Western Priorities.
