re: 9000 unused oil leases. Inform me please.

I know a guy that retired a couple of years ago, he was a geologist of some sort that worked for one of the majors and his career was trying to figure out what leases the company should get.

There's a lot of boom and bust. He told me that they have to drill within the lease in so much time or they lose it and it goes back into the pool. So a lot of times, they would do a very basic drill just to say they did something, so they can hang on to it.

Of course there's also a lot of leases where they drill and it's crap so they stop.

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There are around 5,000 DUC (drilled but uncompleted) wells in the US, getting those online is much lower hanging fruit than future leases if the goal is increasing domestic supply.

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I think you are looking at the wrong axis of the chart. This chart show there are less than 2,000 with the trend going to zero fast.

you may want to glance at your chart again,

Apache alpine play hasnt worked out for them too good. Thats 1 example

I’m a geologist for a major and I can say that most of the information in here is accurate. The “unused leases” tagline spouted out by the admin is a convenient talking point for them but for people who know the industry it falls on deaf ears. Only a fraction of leases are actually prospective but in order to shoot seismic or drill an exploratory well on a lease it has to be acquired. The industry spends billions of dollars on buying leases that never produce a single ounce of income to those companies.

There may be 9,000 but they are likely in marginal production areas - low oil reserves, hard to get to, hard to get oil out of the area, etc.

It is a BS number the admin is using to pass the buck.