"Low Interest In Offshore Drilling Rights At Auction"

"Oil companies facing an industrywide glut showed low interest Wednesday in bidding on offshore drilling rights in the western Gulf of Mexico.

At the first-ever drilling-rights auction to be live streamed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM), only 24 tracts of ocean received bids, and just one bid per tract, out of the nearly 4,400 made available to companies.

The bids came from only three companies and totaled just over $18 million, the lowest amount ever at a drilling-rights auction. That compared with $22.7 million in high bids from the last sale in March, which was the smallest at the time."

Timothy Cama reports for The Hill August 24, 2016.