The U.S. cancels all oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters

Story: 2035 C.E. ???  |  Last updated: January 8, 2026

Note: This is an imagined future story, written as if a projected milestone has occurred. It is based on current trends and evidence, not confirmed events.

In a decision that closes a chapter more than a century in the making, the United States Bureau of Land Management has announced the cancellation of all remaining oil and gas leases on federal lands and waters. The move, finalized in 2035 C.E., marks the first time since the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 C.E. that no active fossil fuel extraction leases exist on land managed in the public trust — roughly 245 million acres across the American West, Alaska, and the outer continental shelf.

The scenario

• Federal oil and gas leases: All remaining active leases on BLM-managed public lands and federal waters have been allowed to expire or have been voluntarily relinquished, with no new competitive lease sales held since 2031 C.E.
• Revenue transition: Annual lease receipts, which peaked at over $1.15 billion in a single sale cycle during the early 2020s C.E., have been redirected into a Federal Lands Renewable Energy Fund supporting solar, wind, and geothermal development on the same public lands.
• Jobs and communities: A federally funded Just Transition program, phased in from 2028 C.E. onward, has retraining and economic diversification support for the roughly 150,000 workers in communities most directly tied to federal fossil fuel revenues.

How it happened

The path here was not straight. As recently as the mid-2020s C.E., the BLM was processing hundreds of new drilling permits per quarter, and competitive lease sales were generating hundreds of millions of dollars in a single cycle. The program’s own data showed total receipts of more than $1.15 billion from a single quarterly sale — money that flowed to the U.S. Treasury and to state governments that rely on federal mineral revenues for schools and infrastructure.

What changed was a convergence of economics and policy. Solar and wind power dropped below the cost of new natural gas extraction on federal land by 2027 C.E., making many proposed leases financially unattractive even before regulatory pressure mounted. Several large energy companies quietly declined to bid at lease auctions, preferring to invest in utility-scale renewables on the same BLM-managed landscape — land that, it turned out, holds some of the best solar and wind resources in the world.

Legal challenges also reshaped the program. A series of federal court rulings through 2029 C.E. and 2030 C.E. required the BLM to fully account for downstream greenhouse gas emissions in environmental reviews of new leases — a requirement that made approvals slower, costlier, and increasingly difficult to defend.

What the land holds now

Federal public lands are not empty without oil rigs. The same acreage that once generated lease bonuses and royalty payments from fossil fuel extraction is now producing electricity. BLM data from 2035 C.E. shows more than 40 gigawatts of approved renewable energy capacity on federal lands, with thousands of miles of transmission corridors under active permitting.

Tribal nations — many of whose ancestral territories overlap with federal oil and gas lease blocks — have been among the most active voices shaping what comes next. Several Indigenous-led energy cooperatives hold long-term agreements with the BLM to develop geothermal and solar projects on lands where drilling permits once ran for decades. This kind of community-led stewardship is part of a broader set of conservation and resource protection efforts redefining how public lands are managed around the world.

Wildlife corridors previously fragmented by well pads and access roads are being restored. The BLM’s own land health assessments show measurable improvement in sage-grouse habitat across the Great Basin — an area that had seen some of the most intensive lease activity in the prior two decades.

The honest complications

None of this has been clean. States like Wyoming, New Mexico, and North Dakota that built budget models around federal mineral royalty payments are navigating real fiscal pressure. Wyoming alone received more than $500 million annually in federal mineral revenues at the program’s peak. The replacement revenue from renewable energy leases is growing but has not yet reached parity in every affected state.

Workers in oil-producing communities have had mixed experiences with the transition programs. Retraining initiatives have worked well in urban and semi-urban areas where alternative employment is accessible. In remote rural communities — particularly in the Permian Basin’s federal lease zones and the Powder River Basin — the adjustment has been harder and slower than program designers projected.

The offshore picture is also more complicated. While onshore BLM leases have wound down, a separate legal and regulatory framework governs the outer continental shelf, and some existing offshore production continues under legacy agreements managed by the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management. The 2035 C.E. announcement covers BLM-administered onshore federal lands and does not automatically terminate all offshore activity — a distinction critics of the policy have been quick to name.

A different kind of public land

What the BLM is now managing looks different from what it managed ten years ago — not in acreage, but in purpose. The agency’s stated mission has shifted from “facilitating safe and responsible energy development” in fossil fuels toward facilitating safe and responsible energy development in renewables, while also expanding its conservation and habitat mandates.

Whether that shift proves durable across future administrations remains genuinely open. Federal land policy has swung with presidential priorities throughout American history, and the legal infrastructure that once governed oil and gas leasing — the Mineral Leasing Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act — has not been repealed. It has been reinterpreted, administratively redirected, and in some cases amended, but the underlying framework still exists. Future governments retain the legal tools to restart a leasing program if political will shifts.

For now, though, the BLM’s leasing ledger reads zero. And across the American West, on high desert plateaus and in boreal forests and along coastlines, the land that the federal government holds in trust for the American public is producing something it has not produced in over a hundred years: quiet.

Read more

For more on this story, see: Bureau of Land Management — Oil and Gas Program

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