The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has reported receiving a total of USD 24.7 million in high bids during a recent geothermal lease sale in Utah, where 32 out of 37 parcels offered received bids. The lease sale also recorded a high bid per parcel of USD 4.16 million and a high bid per acre of USD 1207. The parcels are located in Millard and Beaver counties.
The lease sale set a few new records for BLM geothermal lease sales, signaling steadily growing interest in developing geothermal projects in federal lands in the United States.
Earlier this year, a geothermal lease sale in New Mexico set several federal records. With 47 parcels receiving offers, the lease sale recorded receipts of USD 16.5 million, a high bid of USD 3.14 for a parcel, and a high bid of USD 701 per acre. All of these records were broken by the recent Utah geothermal lease sale by a comfortable margin.
The Utah geothermal lease sale also marks the first time that several parcels received bids exceeding USD 1000 per acre.
The BLM has not yet published information on the companies that made the winning bids, and the corresponding price of each bid. This information is typically published a few days after the lease sale. This article will be updated with this information once it becomes available.
The following are the other BLM geothermal lease sales planned later this year:
- Nevada – October 2026
- Idaho – November 2026
Utah is already one of the most important states in the US for emerging geothermal companies and technologies. It is the site of the Utah FORGE project, the Cape Station project by Fervo Energy, and other projects in earlier stages of development. With optimism building around next-generation geothermal technologies like Enhanced Geothermal and closed-loop geothermal, many metrics indicate that investor interest in geothermal in the United States is hitting an all-time high.
Source: BLM NEPA Register
