The Bureau of Land Management administers roughly 37,500 federal oil and gas leases covering about 26.6 million acres, with close to 96,100 wells. The Forest Service separately administers about 5,154 leases across roughly 3.8 million acres, which is around 2% of National Forest System land.
A substantial share of leased acreage has never been drilled. Critics of expansion use that to argue leasing is not the binding constraint on production, since companies already hold inventory they have not developed. Industry responds that not every parcel is commercially viable, and that holding acreage is how firms manage geology and price risk across multi-year timeframes.
The BLM has proposed roughly 777,835 acres for lease sales in 2026 across fourteen states, surpassing any year since 2020. Approvals moved in the same direction: in fiscal year 2025 the agency approved 6,106 applications for permit to drill, among the highest totals since 2008. Federal law now also requires a minimum number of lease sales each year in nine states, which removes some agency discretion over whether to hold them at all.
Those figures are large in absolute terms but modest against the existing base. The proposed 2026 acreage is roughly 3% of what is already leased, which is part of why both sides can describe the same policy as either a major expansion or a marginal adjustment.
Royalty revenue complicates the picture further. Payments from federal leases are shared with the states where production occurs, and in New Mexico and Wyoming they fund schools, roads, and permanent trust funds that rural counties have no obvious way to replace. Recent leasing changes also lowered royalty rates, which means the public return per barrel fell even as acreage offered rose. How much a state actually collects therefore depends as much on rate-setting as on how many acres go under lease.
Most public attention goes to western rangeland, but the larger acreage decision is offshore. The eleventh National Outer Continental Shelf leasing program would make roughly 1.3 billion acres available between 2026 and 2031. That single program dwarfs the entire onshore federal footprint, though the share actually leased and drilled is always a small fraction of what is offered.
In January 2026 the Forest Service finalized a rule replacing parcel-by-parcel environmental analysis with broader programmatic review, and the BLM proposed reverting several leasing provisions adopted in 2024, including bonding levels that determine how much a company must post to guarantee well cleanup.
Supporters describe this as removing duplication that added years without changing outcomes. Critics argue parcel-level review is exactly where site-specific harms get identified, and that lower bonding leaves taxpayers holding remediation costs when operators go bankrupt, a pattern already visible in orphaned-well programs.
The right generally argues that producing domestically under U.S. environmental and labor standards beats importing from jurisdictions with weaker rules, that royalties fund schools and infrastructure in rural counties with few alternatives, and that multiple-use is the statutory mandate Congress actually wrote. The left generally argues that new leases lock in decades of infrastructure, that recreation economies are renewable while extraction is finite, and that a 7% production share is small relative to the landscape changes involved.
One thing both sides accept: horizontal drilling reaches far more resource from a much smaller surface footprint than older vertical methods. They disagree about whether surface footprint is the right measure, given water use, methane leakage, and fragmentation from access roads and pipelines.
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