1. OIL AND GAS:
Alaska reserve to see 2.6M-acre lease sale in October

The Interior Department today finalized plans to lease oil and gas drilling rights on 2.6 million acres of the National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska in October but will delay leasing 430,000 acres in critical wetlands for at least a decade. The 2.6-million-acre area open for leasing this fall could hold as much as 3 billion barrels of recoverable oil and trillions of cubic feet of natural gas, said BLM Alaska Director Tom Lonnie. Go to story #1