On September 14, 2022, BOEM announced that 307 high bids from Lease Sale 257 in the Gulf of Mexico were accepted. BOEM also announced that one high bid was rejected for not providing the public with fair market value. BOEM has not identified the rejected bid.
Per BOEM’s Lease Area Block Online Query file, 306 Sale 257 leases were effective on Oct. 1, 2022. A comparison of these data with the sale results identified 2 Sale 257 leases that have not been awarded:
| lease | block | high bidder(s) | bid | comments |
| G37261 | GC 70 | BHP | $3.6 million | lone bid; 7th highest bid in sale |
| G37294 | GC 777 | BP (75%), Talos (25%) | $1.8 million | 2 bids; next highest $1.185 million |
So one of these 2 bids was rejected and the other has lease not yet been awarded for some reason (or perhaps there has been a clerical/IT issue).
Which bid was rejected? I would guess it was the BHP bid even though that bid was the 7th highest bid in the entire sale. The fact that this bid was $2.5 to $3 million higher than the other 7 BHP bids (all of which were accepted) tells us that the company valued this tract highly. Perhaps BOEM, which has all of the geologic data, thought the value was even higher, which is why the bid may have been rejected.
There was another bidder (Chevron) for the BP/Talos tract, so the competition makes it less likely that the bid would have been rejected.
Ironically, the 94 carbon sequestration bids, which made something of a mockery of the lease sale, could not be rejected on fair market grounds. The bids exceeded the minimum required, and the tracts have little or no value from an oil and gas production standpoint. A competitive process would be require to repurpose these leases for carbon sequestration.
Bud's Offshore Energy (BOE) 