NEW ORLEANS — Oil companies offered nearly $300 million for offshore drilling rights in the Gulf this week, as the Trump administration looks to ramp up domestic oil production.

Thirty companies submitted over 200 bids for tracts off the coast in the Gulf, with a large portion of those bids near Louisiana's coast. Chevron and BP were among the highest bidders.

"We had the first lease sale in quite a while. It's really an exciting moment for Louisiana. In many ways, it is a return to normalcy," Louisiana Mid-Continent Oil & Gas Association President Tommy Faucheux told WBRZ. "The lease sale that took place really gets the industry back on track with predictable leasing for the future, and so that's extremely important for the state's economy. It relies heavily on energy jobs. 306,000 energy jobs in the state,"  

Greg Upton, the Executive Director for LSU's Center for Energy Studies, said that around 81 million acres were up for lease. 

"If you look at the last two lease sales, that one was in March of 2023 and then the other was in in December of 2023, this is actually right in line, kind of in the middle of the pack so the margin was $263 million in the sum of high bids, while the one in December was 382 million in high bids," Upton said. 

As of Friday, oil is only selling for around $60 a barrel. Upton said that when companies anticipate that the price of oil will rise in the future, they're more likely to invest. 

"Louisiana receives no direct royalties from production in federal lands in the water bottoms. Now, there are allocations that go back to the states through what's called GOMESA. There were actually some changes to those formulas that were made over the last few years that increase the amount that the state is getting for those amounts of dollars," Upton said. 

Several environmental groups have come out against the bids, saying offshore drilling can hurt Louisiana.

"Ocean drilling is dirty and dangerous, and this lease sale, which is selling off our ocean to the highest bidder, means more oil spills, more harm to the Gulf Coast and its wildlife. The only people who are going to benefit from this lease sale are the billionaires who are trying to squeeze every last drop out of our oceans," Rachel Matthews with the Center for Biological Diversity said. 

According to Upton, Louisiana has about half the drilling workers that it did a decade ago. 

"If you go back before the 2014 price crash, Louisiana had about 50,000 workers in what we call the Upstream Oil and Gas Extraction and Services Sectors. When the price crash happened in 2014 and 2015, we lost somewhere in the ballpark of 17-18,000 of those jobs. That actually put Louisiana into a recession. We're projecting that things are going to stabilize. We might gain about half of those jobs back over the next year or so, but I don't think we're going to get back to the pre-pandemic numbers, nor the pre-2014 numbers," Upton said. 

Faucheux said that the Gulf region produces some of the lowest carbon-emission barrels of oil anywhere in the world.