OCR Text |
Show Order Allows Oil, Gas Leasing to Continue Good news for southern Utahns came when Secretary of the Interior Cecil Andrus announced that he is directing the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) to begin action necessary to reopen the onshore noncompetitive oil and gas leasing system which was suspended February 29. Andrus scheduled full leasing acv tivities for oil and gas on the federal public lands to resume June 16. The secretary's decision was made after his review of departmental recommendations on whether the leasing system could be altered and monitored to correct the abuse which an ongoing investigation had disclosed. Processing will begin immediatley for leases awarded but held up by a February leasing freeze. Noncompetitive oil and gas leasing, run through over-the-counter and lottery systems, was suspended in February after evidence of massive fraud and abuse in the program was revealed by an Interior Department investigation. The Interior Department claimed that alleged wide-spread criminal activities in the two processes were so pervasive that they threatened the validity of any lease offering and the integrity of the leasing system. Andrus ordered the establishmentof a BLM work group to "report to him whether and under what circumstances noncompetitive leasing could be resumed free of fraud. The order to resume leasing resulted from that work group's findings with new rules proposed for regulating the alleged abuses. According to Senator Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) who had called for an early resumption of the noncompetitive lease system in a radio interview March 22 and recently joined a group of 18 legislators who wrote to Andrus urging resumption of the lease program. "Noncompetitive leasing encourages independent drillers to find new oil and we badly need that now." Hatch said, "We need to find out how much gas and oil we have in our country on the public lands to help end our disastrous dependence on foreign oil. Noncompetitive leasing encourages independents to explore where the 'experts' say there is no oil. The independents keep proving the experts wrong. Over 90 percent of new discoveries are made by these independent drillers. We need the oil they find." |