Sales of Fossil Fuels Produced from Federal and Indian Lands, FY 2003 through FY 2011

Release date: March 14, 2012

Background

This paper was prepared in response to recent requests that the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) provide updated summary information regarding fossil fuel production on Federal and Indian lands¹ in the United States. It provides EIA's current best estimates of fossil fuels sales from production on Federal and Indian lands for fiscal year ² (FY) 2003 through FY 2011.

Although EIA has regularly published summary information on this topic in its Annual Energy Review, it should be noted that the data regarding fossil fuel sales (for purposes of assessing royalty payments from production on Federal and Indian lands) are collected by various programs within the Department of the Interior (DOI), and not by EIA. The sales volumes reported in this paper, as those in EIA's earlier summaries, rely exclusively on information provided by the DOI. However, this report includes some categories of production that were not included in our earlier summaries, such as volumes on which no royalties were paid due to lease provisions and those that were transferred to add to the Nation's Strategic Petroleum Reserve under Royalty-in-Kind programs. It also reports all sales in the fiscal year in which they were made, unlike previous summaries which reported some sales in the year that royalties were collected. The sales reported in this paper provide a better proxy for marketed production volumes than do those reported in previous summaries.

EIA has worked closely with the DOI Office of Natural Resource Revenues (ONRR), which has posted on its website and shared information with EIA on sales of fossil fuels produced on Federal and Indian lands based on information reported to it through February 6, 2012. Helpful discussions between EIA staff and DOI staff between February 18, 2012, when a data file was first provided to EIA, and the issuance of this paper are gratefully acknowledged.

Data on fossil fuel sales continually flow into the DOI program offices, and those programs also conduct audit activities that may result, over time, in changes in the previously reported data to both sales and royalty payments. Past experience suggests that data for sales from production on Federal and Indian lands in FY 2011 could continue to change for some time, and that revisions to such data are more likely than not to increase reported sales. However, there is no reason to expect that such continuing updates would change the "big picture" results summarized below.

Findings

Production and sales of fossil fuels from Federal and Indian lands can be influenced by a variety of factors, including, but not limited to, Federal leasing and regulatory policies. Total sales of all fossil fuels produced on Federal and Indian lands, which are measured in terms of British thermal units (Btu) to allow for aggregation across all fossil fuels, rose by about 1 percent between fiscal year FY 2009 and FY 2010 and dropped by about 6 percent between FY 2010 and FY 2011 (Table 1).

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Footnotes

¹Includes offshore and onshore areas the Federal Government owns or administers, including American Indian lands.

²The U.S. Government's fiscal year runs from October 1 through September 30. The fiscal year is designated by the calendar year in which it ends.