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Oil, gas leases sold
| Wednesday, Sep 13 2006 8:10 PM
Last Updated: Thursday, Sep 14 2006 10:15 AM
The federal Bureau of Land Management on Wednesday auctioned off five oil and gas leases near Taft for $1.5 million-- a record for a BLM auction in California.
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The 10-year leases, covering some 2,500 acres in the former Naval Petroleum Reserve-2, now called the Buena Vista Field, were all awarded to Occidental of Elk Hills Inc. The BLM received 14 bids at the auction, which took place in Bakersfield. It was the first time in 80 years that leases for those parcels have been offered.
The bureau took over management of NPR-2 -- once used to fuel naval ships -- from the U.S. Department of Energy last year. The transfer took several years to finalize.
Seeing the parcels finally auctioned off is "pretty gratifying," said John Kaiser, a petroleum engineer at the BLM who worked on the transfer.
Occidental of Elk Hills, based in Tupman, outside Taft, paid the federal government $3.5 billion in 1998 for NPR-1, also known as Elk Hills, according to the company's Web site.
The land auctioned Wednesday is "a strategic fit with our California operations," said Jan Sieving, spokeswoman for Occidental's Los Angeles parent company, Occidental Petroleum.
The $1.5 million will go into a special account set up for transition-related costs incurred by the BLM, Kaiser said.
NPR-2 totals 10,500 acres of federal land. Of that, 8,000 acres were already leased to oil and gas companies when the BLM took over the field.
The parcels leased Wednesday are "the last of the lot," Kaiser said.