The Interior Department in March will offer 38 million acres in the central Gulf of Mexico for oil and gas development.

Consistent with recent sales, the March 20 auction in New Orleans will offer all unleased areas off the coasts of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. It will be the second of a dozen scheduled Gulf sales under the agency's 2012-2017 offshore leasing plan, which it finalized this summer.

The first sale in the western Gulf, announced earlier this year, will take place Nov. 28 in New Orleans.

"The Obama administration is fully committed to developing our domestic energy resources to create jobs, foster economic opportunities and reduce America's dependence on foreign oil," Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said in a statement. "We are moving full speed ahead on the president's all-of-the-above energy strategy because the exploration and development of the Gulf of Mexico's vital energy resources will continue to help power our nation and drive our economy."

The proposed sale could allow production of nearly 1 billion barrels of oil and up to 4 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management said. The central Gulf contains nearly 31 billion barrels of recoverable oil, more than double the amount in any other federal planning area.

As with recent sales, the March sale will include incentives to encourage timely development and ensure a fair return to taxpayers, BOEM said. The agency has also introduced a streamlined format for sale notices that it said would make the documents more user-friendly and accessible to the public.

Today's announcement comes three months after the agency's last central Gulf lease sale garnered more than $1.7 billion in high bids for more than 2.4 million acres, including a record $157 million for a single lease by Statoil (E&ENews PM, June 20).

The sale was a sign that investment in the Gulf remains robust despite a yearlong permitting slowdown following the Deepwater Horizon incident in April 2010 and significant new safety regulations.

The Gulf supplies roughly a quarter of domestic oil production.