U.S. Department of the Interior
Minerals Management Service
Office of Communications

NEWS RELEASE

MMS AND WYOMING OPEN BIDDING FOR ROYALTY-IN-KIND OIL FROM FEDERAL AND STATE PROPERTIES

        The Department of the Interior’s Minerals Management Service (MMS) and the State of Wyoming announced today the offering for sale of approximately 3,250 barrels of royalty crude oil per day from Federal and State properties. As part of an MMS pilot program on taking royalty-in-kind, the agency and the State of Wyoming are partnering to make this joint offering of sale. This is the third offering for sale of crude oil under the pilot program in Wyoming.

        The sale will involve royalty production taken from 66 Federal and State properties located in the Bighorn and Powder River Basins of Wyoming. Bids will be accepted on specific pipeline subgroups and/or entire packages of Wyoming sweet, sour, and asphaltic sour crude. Delivery of actual production will begin on October 1, 1999, and continue for six months.

        Specific information regarding the sale is detailed in an Invitation for Bid (IFB) No. 31010, posted on the MMS website at www.mms.gov.   For additional information, please contact Mr. Bonn Macy, MMS, at 202-208-3827 or Mr. Harold Kemp, State of Wyoming, at 307-777-6643.

        MMS is the federal agency that manages the Nation’s natural gas, oil and other mineral resources on the Outer Continental Shelf; and collects, accounts for, and last year disbursed about $6 billion in revenues from federal offshore mineral leases and from onshore mineral leases on federal and Indian lands.

-MMS-

MMS Internet website address: http://www.mms.gov
24 hour Fax-on-Demand Service:(202) 219-1703