The bidding battle for a large amount of land and mineral rights offered for sale by Occidental Petroleum in Wyoming, Colorado and Utah didn’t end up in the hands of Wyoming as its state leaders had hoped.
Despite not having the winning bid, Gov. Mark Gordon says his state will deep its bid active and confidential, just in case the top bid doesn’t pass muster.
“We believe our bid positions Wyoming to generate additional investment revenue and would keep taxes low into the future,” Gordon said.
The total land area involved in the sale is bigger than Connecticut. About 20% of the land includes surface rights that could be leased for grazing or wind and solar energy projects.
The other 80% involves only mineral rights — ownership of trona, oil and natural gas reserves that could be leased for mining and drilling.
Occidental Vice President for Corporate Affairs Melissa Schoeb didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Gordon learned Saturday that Wyoming hadn’t submitted the leading bid, his spokesman Michael Pearlman said.
Officials don’t know who submitted the leading bid or how many bids there were, Pearlman said.
Proponents of Wyoming buying the land have said it could deliver a better return than the current rate on 10-year Treasuries. Opponents question the wisdom of Wyoming investing heavily in the boom-and-bust minerals industry amid weak revenue from coal, oil and natural gas extraction.
Much of the land was the old route of the Transcontinental Railroad. The federal government granted Union Pacific Railroad as much as 20 square miles (52 square kilometers) of land in Wyoming and other Western states for every mile (1.6 kilometer) of track laid as an incentive to build the railroad in the 1860s.
The arrangement left Union Pacific with enormous land holdings interspersed with federal lands in a “checkerboard” pattern across a large area of the West.
Anadarko Petroleum bought the land from Union Pacific and Occidental acquired it in a merger with Anadarko in 2019.
Source: Omaha World Herald
