Statistical analysis of re-bid federal offshore Gulf of Mexico oil and gas leases

Through 1977, there were 178 cases where exactly the same Federal offshore oil and gas bonus bid lease was offered and received bids in 2 sales. (In addition, there were 131 cases where there was an overlap of acreage between a lease offered and receiving bids in 2 sales.)

Table 1 summarizes these exact re-bid leases which are in 2 categories: (1) Leases re-bid after rejection of any and all bids received as a result of a prior offering, and (2) Leases re-bid after prior offering, issue, and relinquishment of a lease. We will call the former category rejected re-bid leases, the latter relinquished re-bid leases. Table 1 shows there were 120 of the former and 58 of the latter.

The purpose of this study was simply development and analysis of the statistics of re-bid leases. The reasons why the data behave as they do are subjective and unavoidably involve nontechnical value judgments. Therefore, we do not speculate on the reasons in this report. The data source for this study was the LPR-5/-10 data base maintained by the General Services Administration, Fort Worth, Texas.