Houston (Platts)--25Sep2012/519 pm EDT/2119 GMT

The US Bureau of Land Management plans to hold a oil and natural gas lease sale for the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska on November 7 in Anchorage, Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar said Tuesday.

The lease sale will include 400 tracts and cover about 4.5 million acres in the NPR-A. The most recent NPR-A lease sale, held last December, made 283 tracts and 3 million acres available.

BLM released the draft determination of National Environmental Policy Act adequacy document in support of the planned oil and gas lease sale. The draft determination and a map of tracts to be offered by the sale are posted at www.blm.gov/ak.

"The energy resources of the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska are essential to meeting our nation's energy demands and will enhance domestic energy production and decrease dependency on foreign oil sources," Salazar said in a statement.

"The November sale is in line with the president's direction to continue to expand domestic energy production, safely and responsibly. Since the president took office, domestic oil and gas production has increased each year with oil production higher than any time in eight years, and production of domestic natural gas at an all-time high," Salazar said.

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The BLM sought public input on tract nominations for lands in the NPR-A planning areas that are not currently leased or deferred from leasing. It selected the tracts based on an evaluation of comments received, natural resource information, resource potential, industry interest, and subsistence values. The comment period ran from May 15 through June 29.

The BLM will submit a notice of sale to the Federal Register to be published at least 30 days prior to the sale.

This will be the eighth oil and gas lease sale in the NPR-A since 1999. In May 2011, President Obama directed that annual oil and gas lease sales be conducted in the NPR-A. The first such annual BLM lease sale last December generated 17 winning bids covering about 120,000 acres.

To date, only exploratory drilling has occurred within the NPR-A, although in 2011, with the assistance of the President's Interagency Working Group on Coordination of Domestic Energy Development and Permitting in Alaska, permits were issued to ConocoPhillips to allow for future production of oil and gas resources within the NPR-A.

Currently, there are 186 authorized oil and gas leases totaling 1,481,092 acres within the planning areas of the NPR-A.

--Jim Magill, jim_magill@platts.com

--Edited by Keiron Greenhalgh, keiron_greenhalgh@platts.com

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