Offshore Minerals Management Home Page -- Welcome to Our New Offshore Home Page

Welcome to the Office of Public Affairs News Room!

MMS Secures Ocean Energy, the Environment
and Economic Value for America

The United States energy picture for the next 20 years may be one of increasing demand and decreasing domestic supply. As the Nation explores our oceans in the coming decades we may yet discover astonishing alternative sources of energy that could revolutionize how we generate electricity, heat our homes, and fuel our automobiles.

The Nation’s formidable ocean exploration and management agencies, like the Minerals Management Service, are working on solving the many puzzles of the ocean, but we still face an ongoing challenge of meeting today’s energy needs. MMS, part of the Department of the Interior, is helping secure America’s energy future and quality of life, while protecting the environment and providing fair equity for the use of Federal lands.

An agency of about 1,700 people in 20 cities across the United States, MMS is America’s ocean energy manager, with over 1.76 billion offshore acres of land under its jurisdiction. The MMS manages the lands called the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS), which are the submerged lands seaward beyond coastal States’ waters. There are two primary programs in MMS: the Minerals Revenue Management program and the Offshore Minerals Management program. The Directorate of Policy and Management Improvement, the Directorate of Administration and Budget, and the Offices of Public and Congressional Affairs support both programs.

The MMS’s activities provide major economic and energy benefits to taxpayers, states, and the American Indian community.

The MMS oversees production of about 23 percent of the natural gas and 30 percent of the oil produced in the United States. Fifty-six million American homes are heated by natural gas, and about 90 percent of the new energy plants that come online in the next decade will be powered by natural gas. In the OCS, MMS regulates the energy companies that explore for and extract oil and gas resources, and conducts ocean studies of marine mammals and the spectacular coral reefs like those in the Flower Garden Banks National Marine Sanctuary in the Gulf of Mexico.

MMS has three offshore management regions including the Gulf of Mexico Region in New Orleans; the Pacific Region in Camarillo, California; and the Alaska Region in Anchorage. The Gulf of Mexico is considered the Nation’s preeminent source of oil and natural gas, but producing wells are also located in the Pacific and Alaska.

MMS’s other significant core business activity is the collection and disbursement of the billions of dollars in mineral revenues. The agency collects, accounts for, and disburses mineral revenues from Federal and American Indian leases. These revenues total about $135 billion since the agency was created in 1982. Annually, nearly $1 billion from those revenues go into the Land and Water Conservation Fund for the acquisition and development of state and Federal park and recreation lands.

Last Updated: 09/10/2004, 07:09:27 AM