Last week, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) announced the results of its recent oil and gas auction on public lands in North Dakota and Montana. The majority of this round’s proceeds came from a successful $15.1 million bid for a 273-acre parcel entirely beneath the Missouri River, a critical source of drinking water for millions of Americans.

This relatively small lease is a stark reminder of how shale mining continues in and around the places where people get their drinking water. The sale comes amid ongoing disputes over how much public land should be made available to oil and gas drillers and how much protection public land should enjoy.

Last week, the BLM also proposed restricting oil and gas leasing on federal lands in North Dakota – particularly in and around areas where people get their drinking water.

The BLM said it is updating North Dakota regulations adopted in 1988 “to better balance energy and mineral development while supporting outdoor recreation and cultural resources and maintaining healthy habitat for important plant, wildlife and fish species on millions of acres in North Dakota.”

The proposal, which received 535 public comments, appears to contain some significant loopholes.

The BLM’s plan would close the eastern half of North Dakota – where there is no oil and gas activity and no reason there will be – to oil leasing on public lands and restrict coal leasing on the state’s public lands.

However, there is a major caveat: even areas that currently have “low development potential” could eventually be made available for leasing if places that drilling companies do not want to lease today become commercially attractive at some point in the future due to new technologies or future oil discoveries.

That clause was added “in response to the state’s concerns” about not being allowed to lease some public mineral rights, BLM spokesman Mark Jacobsen said in an email. North Dakota had previously sued BLM to force the leasing to resume, citing lost revenue from canceled auctions.

The BLM proposal would also leave public lands in North Dakota containing active oil and gas fields, as well as a five-mile zone around those active areas, available for leasing.

The proposed regulations would also close off a total of just over three square miles (2,000 acres) of “drinking water source protection areas” to future oil and gas leases, a BLM spokesperson told DeSmog in an email. The state would decide which areas are considered protected.

The limited proposal, however, drew immediate criticism from oil industry supporters. John Hoeven, Republican Senator from North Dakota, criticized the BLM proposal as “clumsy” in a statement last week. “We will continue to fight against it and any excessive measures pushed through by the Biden-Harris administration,” Senator Hoeven wrote.

Hoeven’s stance should come as little surprise. According to OpenSecrets, his biggest donors, after “leadership PACs” run by other public officials, are the oil and gas industry. Hess Corp., one of the active drillers in North Dakota’s Bakken shale, was Hoeven’s third-largest donor from 2019 to 2024, OpenSecrets notes. Next is asset manager Blackstone Group, which is heavily invested in Energy Transfer (the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, commonly known as DAPL) and other fossil fuel companies that are heavily active in the Bakken shale. (Oil giant Chevron is currently trying to buy Hess, although that $59.9 billion deal has been repeatedly delayed.)

The agency had suspended oil and gas leasing on public lands in 2021 and for part of 2022 under an executive order from Biden. However, the state of North Dakota sued over that suspension, and last year a federal judge in North Dakota ordered the agency to temporarily resume leasing public lands in the state, despite objections from the Interior Department and several environmental groups. Litigation in that case is ongoing.

A 30-day “protest period” against the new rules proposed by the BLM began on August 9, the agency said in its announcement.

Drilling beneath the Missouri

The 273-acre property, for which Pride Energy Co. made a $15.1 million bid last week, lies directly beneath the Missouri River. The auction was for a 50 percent interest in the property, which is operated by shale oil billionaire Harold Hamm’s Continental Resources (NYSE:CLR). The BLM spokesman pointed out that surface drilling platforms can sometimes be quite far from where a shale oil well ends.

“With the advent of directional drilling, operators can reach small parcels from considerable distances. I have heard of cases where wells were drilled about three kilometers deep before drilling two kilometers horizontally to reach a deposit,” BLM spokesman Jacobsen told DeSmog. “The bottom line: the circumstances of each drilling platform are site-specific.”

The Missouri River is already densely populated with horizontal oil and gas wells deep underground, with most of the drilling in the area being done by Continental Resources and Bakken specialist Chord Energy (NASDAQ: CHRD).

But even though drilling companies are able to drill for oil from platforms miles away, these platforms are conspicuously close to the banks of the Missouri. Satellite images south of the oil lease show the silhouettes of pumping rigs just a few hundred yards from the Missouri’s waters.

Any onshore activities related to drilling and fracking can pose a serious threat to the river. For example, a few years ago, pipeline company Summit Midstream pleaded guilty after dumping over 29 million gallons of oil-contaminated wastewater into tributaries of the Missouri River and deceiving government officials about the severity of the spill, according to the Justice Department, which called the incident the “largest inland oil spill ever.”

Millions of Americans get their drinking water from the Missouri River or from waterways fed by it.

Although the newly proposed rules promise to lock down federally designated drinking water source protection areas, they do not appear to prevent further leasing in the Missouri region. That’s in part because the agency oversees oil and gas leasing on 700 million acres of public lands—but it shares responsibility for more than half of that land with other federal agencies. The BLM’s proposed rules would not affect those agencies’ decisions. Jacobsen, in response to questions from DeSmog, pointed to the Army Corps of Engineers’ oversight of Lake Sakakawea (which was created by damming the Missouri River), for example. Environmental groups have long opposed leasing public lands in the region to oil, gas and coal companies—and have complained that the BLM is too lenient. “I am disappointed in the BLM’s decision to resume leasing after the pause ordered by President Biden,” Linda Weiss, board member of the Dakota Resource Council and the Western Organization of Resource Councils, said last year when both groups joined lawsuits against public land leasing. She added that it “reflects the agency’s long history of preferential treatment of industry at the expense of people and the environment.”