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.