Protect Colorado’s public lands from June oil and gas lease sales
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Protect Colorado’s public lands from June oil and gas lease sales ∎
Help when it’s needed most
Carefully curated actions designed to help Colorado fight back effectively. Some assignments will be serious, some will be silly — all will make a difference.
Current action
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is proposing to roll back the 2024 Onshore Oil & Gas Leasing Rule — dismantling hard-won protections for the public, taxpayers, and private landowners, and handing the oil and gas industry an even bigger thumb on the scale.
The BLM is required to consider public comments on this rule before finalizing it. Your voice becomes part of the official record and helps hold the agency accountable.
Submit your comment before 10pm MT on August 24 to keep the public, taxpayers, and landowners in the process.
Note: To make sure your comment counts, add your own words to the example below. Agencies give more weight to original comments than identical copy-and-paste text. Introduce yourself, share your connection to public lands, and explain why this matters to you.
Learn More
The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is proposing to roll back the 2024 Onshore Oil & Gas Leasing Rule — dismantling hard-won protections for the public, taxpayers, and private landowners, and handing the oil and gas industry an even bigger thumb on the scale.
Here’s what the rollback does:
❌ Silences the public. It eliminates the standard 30-day scoping and 30-day draft comment periods in leasing reviews, leaving only a truncated 10-day protest window — and adds a new pay-to-play barrier of $1 per page for protests longer than 50 pages.
❌ Sticks taxpayers with the cleanup bill. It returns minimum cleanup bonds to 1960s levels — just $10,000 per lease and $25,000 statewide. A $10,000 bond covers less than 15% of the roughly $71,000 it costs to plug and reclaim a modern well. With 7,722 producing federal wells in Colorado, that exposes taxpayers to more than $518 million in future cleanup liability when companies walk away or go bankrupt.
❌ Cuts private landowners out. It eliminates the long-standing requirement to notify private surface owners when the federal minerals beneath their farms and ranches are leased — across more than 27.1 million acres of split-estate land in Colorado.
❌ Removes leasing safeguards. It discards the "preference criteria" that steer leasing away from crucial wildlife habitat, water, and recreation — dismissing them as "duplicative."
❌ Rubber-stamps industry nominations. Paired with the 2025 budget reconciliation law that forces the BLM to lease industry-nominated parcels within 18 months, the rollback leaves the agency little room to say no — putting iconic places like the Roan Plateau directly in the crosshairs.
This is deeply out of step with Colorado. In the 2026 Colorado College Conservation in the West Poll, 90% of Colorado voters support keeping the requirement that companies — not taxpayers — pay for cleanup; 78% want leaders to prioritize protecting water, air, wildlife, and recreation over maximizing drilling; and 74% oppose fast-tracking oil and gas by cutting environmental review and public input.
Submit your comment by 10pm MT on MOnday, August 24 to protect Colorado’s wildlife, water and communities!