Obama to announce new Gulf oil and gas lease sale today

President Barack Obama will announce today a new oil and gas lease sale in the central Gulf of Mexico to be held in New Orleans on June 20, The Times-Picayune reports. The lease sale, which will include all available unleased areas in the Central Planning Area off of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama, will make about 38 million acres available and could result in the production of 1 billion barrels of oil and 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, according to Interior Department estimates. The areas available are located anywhere from three to about 230 miles offshore, in water up to 11,115 feet deep in the Central Gulf of Mexico. The terms of the sale are designed, according to administration officials, to encourage “diligent development,” including rental rates that escalate the longer it takes to move forward with exploration and development, while acknowledging the additional time necessary to satisfy more stringent regulatory requirements in the deeper waters. In his State of the Union address Tuesday, Obama promised, “I will not back down from making sure an oil company can contain the kind of oil spill we saw in the Gulf two years ago.” Drill down to the full story here.