Tens of thousands of acres of Bureau of Land Management Land in Colorado will be available to lease for oil and gas development next year. These leases will take place under new rules laid out in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act that make it easier and cheaper for developers to acquire land.
The OBBB returned non-competitive leasing, which allows companies to lease land for just $3 an acre, eliminates the $5-per-acre nomination fee which was meant to crack down on speculative leasing, and cut royalty rates paid by operators by about 25%. It also mandates quarterly lease sales, and limits the BLM’s ability to put conditions on leases or decline them altogether.
The BLM says the sales will help support the Trump administration’s goal of “unleashing American energy,” as laid out in a January executive order.
In its press release, the BLM’s Colorado office wrote that the OBBB “reduces the cost of doing business on public lands, making oil and gas development more economically attractive to industry. This is expected to spur additional leasing and drilling activity, which in turn supports increased domestic energy production and strengthens U.S. energy security.”
Jim Ramey, Colorado state director for the Wilderness Society, said the new rules effectively prioritizes fossil fuels over other uses on BLM lands, like recreation.
“Who wants to go elk-hunting, or mountain biking, or hiking, or trail running, or camping in an area that is being developed for a heavy industrial use?” he said.
Ramey also pointed out that it’s not immediately clear whether the land in question has a high potential to yield a return on investment for oil and gas companies.
“Much of the existing public lands that are already leased are those higher potential (areas) for oil and gas,” he said. “A lot of these additional areas, I wouldn’t be surprised, if they were moderate or lower potential, because all of those higher-potential areas have been leased already.”
Operators have ten years to start producing oil and gas, otherwise, their lease expires.
The parcels available for lease total 72,848 acres and include areas across Colorado. One parcel is located very close to the city of Aurora on the Front Range, near the city’s water purification facility and a residential neighborhood.
Further west, the parcels include land in the Seymour Lake State Wildlife Area near Walden, portions of the Book Cliffs area near Douglas Pass in Rio Blanco and Garfield counties, parcels in Delta County near the Raggeds Wilderness, and mesas near Plateau Creek, which feeds the Colorado River near Grand Junction and Palisade.
“It kind of runs a full spectrum of potential impacts to both communities, people’s individual health, and to our Colorado outdoor way of life, and the backcountry recreation opportunities that make Western Colorado a special place,” Ramey said of the different lands included in the lease.
The public comment period for these leases ends on October 2nd, with the lease sales taking place in March 2026.
This month, the BLM also announced that it had leased 14 parcels totaling 7,895 acres, mostly in Northern Colorado in Weld, Rio Blanco, and Moffat counties. The agency says the revenue is over $6.7 million, which will be split between the federal government and Colorado.
Nonpartisan watchdog group Taxpayers for Common Sense estimates that with newly reduced royalty rates, taxpayers are losing over $15 million in revenue throughout the lifespan of these leases, which is about 12 years.
“I think that the new law really rigs the system in favor of oil and gas companies, and big polluting companies,” Ramey said. “By doing that, it risks the clean air, clean water, outdoor recreation experiences we need… and it puts a big hurdle on clean energy: wind and solar that we need… in order to have more reliable electricity on the grid.”
Copyright 2025 Rocky Mountain Community Radio. This story was shared via Rocky Mountain Community Radio, a network of public media stations in Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, and New Mexico, including Aspen Public Radio.
