Map reveals 200+ million acres now open to oil and gas drilling

Washington D.C. (July 9, 2025) -- When the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” passed midday Thursday, Congress, under the influence of Trump’s energy dominance agenda, fundamentally tipped the scales of public lands policy in favor of fossil fuels.  

Even without the public lands sell-off provision, the legislation is one of the biggest public lands giveaways to the fossil fuel industry in history. Put simply, President Trump got his wish: whatever the fossil fuel industry wants, they get.  

The Wilderness Society with Rocky Mountain Wild worked together to illustrate this reckless giveaway. Below is a map that shows all BLM lands across the Western United States that are open to oil and gas leasing. 

Access the map here: https://wilderness.maps.arcgis.com/apps/instant/basic/index.html?appid=c473b6952e6d4ea6a286f64c1c5311f2 

In addition to giving away control of more than 200 million acres of BLM-administered lands to the oil and gas industry, this legislation makes it both cheaper and easier to do so via several procedural and fiscal giveaways that will have enormous ramifications for the public lands we know and love. Below are several toplines on how the legislation will touch down: 

• The legislation requires quarterly lease sales in every Western state (regardless of industry interest) and resurrects noncompetitive leasing, which allows industry to lease lands for $1.50/acre when parcels don’t receive competitive bids and have virtually no oil and gas potential. 
• The legislation will reduce the revenue paid to the American people from fossil fuel extraction by 25% -- down to a rate established more than 100 years ago, robbing taxpayers and states of billions of dollars of revenue. 
• The legislation will rescind the $5 per-acre lease nomination fee adopted in the Inflation Reduction Act in 2022 (the last time a budget reconciliation bill was passed), a policy that successfully curbed speculative leasing. 
• The legislation strips BLM’s ability to say “no” to leasing, including in response to local concerns.  Without this discretion, it doesn’t matter if local communities, counties, states, hunters, anglers, recreationists or ranchers have concerns about drilling. BLM must lease any eligible parcel of public land nominated by industry. This includes lands next to more than 60 national parks, scores of state parks, campgrounds, recreation areas – and even local schools and medical centers. 

Proponents of these policies claim that they will lower energy prices for consumers, but there is no evidence that more giveaways to the industry – including lopsided leasing and production incentives on public lands – would reduce gas prices or heating bills. More U.S. drilling isn’t going to help lower prices – it will just deepen our dependence on expensive fossil fuels while destroying our climate, harming our health, polluting communities and cutting off our access to our shared public lands. 

Learn more about what lands are at risk of Trump’s energy dominance agenda in TWS’ 2025 “Open for Drilling” report. 

  To speak with public lands policy experts, contact edenny@tws.org