Thank you for visiting our interactive Gulf of Mexico Federal Offshore Lease Explorer.

This tool was designed using open data from the United States' Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, available at data.boem.gov.

To use the map, simply click on any visible lease block to see the lease number (e.g. G15607), the block area code and block number (e.g. GC 256), and the royalty rate in the popup window. At the same time, you can see all of the lease's current owners, company ownership stake in the lease, and the amount of oil and gas produced from the lease since 2014 in the sidebar on the right.

Visible on default are all the currently owned lease blocks in the Gulf of Mexico. You can filter the data by company by selecting one or more of the checkboxes in the sidebar containing some of the major leaseholders in the Gulf of Mexico. Company leases that had any production in 2014-2016 are shown with a black border.

You can also view the Gulf of Mexico protraction areas by checking Show Protractions. These polygons are helpful in identifying a specific area of the Gulf, and correspond to the block area code (e.g. GC) in the lease popup. Viewing the protractions also reveals just how much of the Gulf is left to be potentially developed. See the BOEM website for more information on protraction areas, including official diagrams.

This interactive map was built using Carto, Carto.js, and R. You can see the lease and production datasets used in the map at pwypusa.carto.com. Be sure to let us know what you think on Twitter @PWYPUSA and check out our other data projects at ExtractAFact.org!