The Bureau of Land Management needs a comprehensive strategy to better manage potential oil and gas well liabilities on federal lands, GAO has said.
It said BLM has developed policies for reviewing bond adequacy and for managing idle wells and abandoned wells, but that BLM has not consistently implemented its policies for managing potential liabilities.
Specifically, for fiscal 2005 – 2009, 13 of 33 field office survey respondents reported that they either did not conduct any reviews or did not know the number of reviews conducted, reportedly due to a lack of resources and low priority placed on those activities, according to GAO-11-292.
It called on BLM to develop a comprehensive strategy to, among other things, increase minimum bond amounts over time and improve its data system to better evaluate potential liability and agency performance.
BLM reportedly has begun taking steps to improve the completeness and accuracy of its oil and gas data.
