On 8 January, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management auctioned off leases on more than 20,000 acres of public land in Colorado for oil and gas drilling. The land, divided into 23 parcels, was offered at the minimum starting price, just $10 an acre, and could be leased indefinitely once oil and gas starts flowing.

Not a single parcel received a bid, and only two companies had even registered for the sale.

This follows after the Department of the Interior (DOI) held a replacement sale in Wyoming on 30 December, re-offering 26,050 acres of federal land for oil and gas development. Just 160 acres were leased, less than 1 percent of what was offered.

The result was unsurprising. The parcels were the same ones industry had ignored at auction just four weeks earlier.

On 9 January Exxon CEO Darren Woods told Trump that the Venezuelan market is “uninvestable” in its current state.

This does not look like the flow of capital to fossil fuels anticipated by the One Big Beautiful Bill Act .

Well WTF you should go and tell the Big Oil companies to bid on the leases since you obviously know a lot more about where the oil is than they do

Note also: around 30,000 acres in the same area were successfully lease in December 2025.

Note also: the land offered was not considered promising.

mhaze,

I don't think WTF is claiming superior geological insight to "Big Oil", so that line is just noise.

The point is about capital behaviour, not amateur prospecting.

If these parcels were genuinely attractive at $10 an acre, the market would have expressed that. It didn’t. Not once. Not even speculatively. Only two companies bothered to register.

Saying "some nearby land leased successfully in December" actually strengthens the point, not weakens it. Capital is clearly being selective. It is flowing only to the most attractive, lowest-risk opportunities and ignoring the rest entirely. That is not what an industry gearing up for a fossil-fuel boom looks like.

As for "not considered promising": exactly. That is the signal. When policy rhetoric says "drill, baby, drill" but capital refuses marginal acreage even at basement prices, it tells you where investor expectations really sit.

Markets don’t argue. They just decline to show up. Which is precisely what happened here.

"Markets don’t argue. They just decline to show up. Which is precisely what happened here."

So things haven't changed since markets were first invented.

Therefore WTF's post is merely a dog bites man story. What's always been still is.

That doesn't follow, mhaze.

If nothing had changed, there wouldn't have been a post to respond to in the first place. The claim under discussion wasn't "markets sometimes ignore marginal land" a truism everyone accepts. It was that recent political and policy changes would meaningfully shift capital back toward fossil fuels.

This auction is evidence against that claim, not a revelation about how markets have "always" behaved.

A dog bites man story is one where expectations are met. This is a case where expectations were explicitly raised, loudly, and then failed to materialise. That's why it's newsworthy.

If policy signalling were genuinely altering investor confidence, you would expect at least some speculative uptake at floor prices, especially given adjacent leasing activity. Instead, capital stayed disciplined and walked past.

So no, this isn't "what's always been". It's what's still happening despite promises that it wouldn't.

And that distinction is the entire point.