Acreage Brief

Eight licensing deadlines fall between now and the end of the year. Indonesia's Phase II round closes first, on 2 November. Newfoundland follows two days later with 16 parcels across two calls for bids. Egypt has two rounds running - EGPC's six blocks close on 11 November and EGAS's eight on 14 December. India's OALP-X and OALP-XI close on 15 November, with 18 deepwater and ultra-deepwater blocks still open between them. Oman closes the year on 31 December with five onshore blocks. Every date here is checked against the regulator's own page, not a press report. When a deadline moves, the register flags it. acreagebrief.com

"Why can't I just Google it - or ask ChatGPT?" It's a fair question. It's the first one I get asked about Acreage. Try it. Ask which oil and gas licensing rounds are open right now. You'll get a confident list. Some rounds closed months ago. Some are press-release announcements with no official dates. Some new ones are missing entirely. Search finds what you already know to look for. It won't tell you about the round you didn't know existed. The second question is usually "Don't the big players just talk to the regulators?" Some do. It works - but it costs a lot. Flights, conference passes, and people whose time goes on watching countries rather than technical work. Even a well-resourced new ventures team can realistically follow a handful of countries closely. Most companies don't have that budget or bandwidth at all. That's the gap Acreage fills. Every two weeks, we check open, rolling and upcoming licensing opportunities across 80 jurisdictions against each regulator's own published record. Each entry carries the date it was checked and a link to the source. Paid subscribers also get the offered and active block outlines on one map. It doesn't replace a meeting with a regulator. It tells you which meetings are worth having. All in one place, checked at source, for a fraction of the cost of a single trip. acreagebrief.com

Brazil held two licensing auctions on 7 October: • Sixth concession cycle: 49 exploration blocks and three marginal accumulation areas received winning bids. • Fourth production-sharing cycle: seven of 13 blocks received winning bids. The next milestone is contract execution. ANP says the winners must complete the remaining documentation and signature bonus payment steps before contracts are signed. Signature is targeted by 26 February 2027. That leaves a period worth following between the auction headline and the executed contract. Acreage tracks those stages alongside upcoming rounds and scheduled award decisions: what has been confirmed, what happens next and which dates the regulator has published. For teams screening acreage or planning subsurface work, the result is one part of the picture. The outstanding steps matter too. Both Brazil entries are now updated, checked against ANP’s publications. Explore the free brief and a sample of the deeper research: https://acreagebrief.com/

A closing date tells you when a round ends. It does not tell you whether you can still enter it. Three from this week's checks, each read from the regulator's own publication. Brazil: ANP's Oferta Permanente session is this Wednesday, 7 October. Declarations of interest and bid guarantees closed on 31 August. The field of bidders was fixed five weeks before the date in the diary. Texas: The General Land Office sale is on 20 October. Tract nominations closed on 15 July. The acreage on offer was settled three months before anyone could bid for it. Oman: The 2026 bid round has no published bid deadline at all. The Ministry of Energy and Minerals' own concessions procedure says the ministry establishes the proposal deadline and notifies registrants. If you are not registered, you are not told when it is. None of this is hidden. It is in the cronograma, the nominating procedures and the ministry's procedure page. It is just not in the one field that gets copied into a planning spreadsheet. So the question we work to is not when does this close. It is when did it stop being possible to enter — because that is the date that decides whether a bid team has anything left to do. Every entry on acreagebrief.com carries the document it came from and the date we last read it. If you know someone this would save time for, please do send it on.

The same minimum signature bonus can hide very different entry commitments. Indonesia’s 2026 Phase II offering is a useful example from Issue 03 of Acreage. The published minimum signature bonus is US$200,000 per area. But the work programme changes substantially: • Belibis requires an exploration well. • Jago requires 500 km² of 3D seismic. • Mahesa requires 1,000 line-km of 2D seismic. Those commitments call for different budgets, capabilities and partners. The bonus alone tells a new-ventures team very little about what entering each area would involve. Data access needs a closer look too. The announcement includes access to the Migas Data Repository, but does not give existing seismic or well coverage figures for each area. A commitment to acquire new data is not evidence of what is already available. For operators, these distinctions help focus the next stage of screening. For seismic and service companies, they identify work requirements worth investigating. Issue 03 includes a side-by-side example showing the free round record and the structured research in Acreage Intelligence, with source links and information gaps clearly marked. Explore the example: https://lnkd.in/eZ6wUm6E Follow Acreage Brief for licensing updates, or message us with the countries you follow to request a relevant Intelligence sample. Based on the ministry announcement of 17 September, checked for this issue on 27 September. Confirm current requirements in the tender documents.

Seven licensing rounds have concluded recently with acreage left over. Blocks that were offered and drew no bid. That acreage does not disappear. It goes back into the basket and the state has to place it another way — a re-offer on revised terms, or a direct negotiation. Libya has announced exactly that: a relaunch of blocks that drew no bid the first time. So the useful question after an award is not who won. It is what was left. Two of the seven states answered it. Cameroon named four blocks: Ndian River, Bakassi, Bomono and Kombe-Nsepe. Kazakhstan's ministry listed the failed plots beside the awarded ones. Five did not. Nigeria states that thirteen blocks drew no bids and will not say which thirteen. Nova Scotia's regulator counts eleven parcels and does not list them. BOEM recaps the fifty-nine tracts that drew bids out of the 15,232 offered, and leaves the rest as arithmetic. On two of them it cannot be worked out at all. Libya's NOC named five winners without publishing which block each took, so the unawarded blocks cannot be identified. Indonesia has not said whether seven working areas drew no bid or are still being evaluated. The take-up rate is not the finding. A wide-area sale offering thousands and placing dozens is behaving normally, and averaging that against a nine-block round produces a number that is true and useless. The finding is that unsold acreage is available acreage, and most states publish just enough to confirm it exists without saying where it is. Every figure here is counted from the award notice itself. Where an entry rests on press rather than on the regulator, the page says so on the entry. acreagebrief.com

Eight licensing rounds close in November. Indonesia on the 2nd. Two Newfoundland parcels on the 4th, with the calls for nominations on the 10th. Egypt's EGPC round on the 11th. Alaska on the 18th. Algeria on the 26th. Bangladesh on the 30th. Nineteen close between now and the end of January. Two of them close on Tuesday. Each of those dates is taken from the regulator's own notice rather than from press coverage, and re-read on a cycle, because deadlines move without announcement. The chart below is every one of them. What it cannot show is the other half of the picture. Twenty-four announced rounds carry no published dates at all. Twenty-four open-door and permanent offers have no deadline by design. Those are not gaps in the chart — they are what the regulators have published, which in those cases is nothing. Seventy-five jurisdictions — oil and gas, CO2 storage, geothermal. Monitored continuously, published every fortnight. acreagebrief.com

Acreage is built around the licensing round - announced, opens, closes, awards. That shape covers most of the world. It misses a category: acreage offered continuously, by application or on a standing calendar, with no round attached. Three readers pointed at it inside a fortnight. Alaska's state areawide sales. The western Canadian provinces, where the posting system means companies drive the timing rather than wait for it. UK storage licences, granted on application rather than in a round. An account manager in Houston put it in one line: how do you evaluate the North Slope without that. Researched, not yet entered - an entry goes up when it has been read off the regulator, not when it has been read about. acreagebrief.com

Two licensing rounds close this week. The figures being reported for both are wrong. VIETNAM — Block 17, Cuu Long basin. Closes 16 September. • The date in the coverage is bid submission, the last of four gates • Registration closed 15 June, the data room 31 July • Anyone reading about it this week cannot bid INDONESIA — 2026 regular tender. Closes 17 September. • Reported as 13 working areas ever since it was announced in May • 2 direct-offer areas closed 6 July • 7 government-studied areas closed 20 July • 4 remain: Namori, South Tanimbar, Cerera, Areca Bruni Nine of the thirteen shut months ago. Neither of these came from the trade press. Both came from opening the regulator's own announcement. That is the whole job. acreagebrief.com

Vietnam's Block 17 closes on 16 September. If you're reading this, you can't bid on it. Registration closed on 15 June. The data room closed on 31 July. Tender dossiers went out between 3 and 14 August. The date everyone quotes is the last of four gates, not the first. It happens more than it should. Oman's 2026 round is widely quoted as closing on 30 September. That is the registration deadline. The ministry's own data room gives the window as 12 April to 31 December and never publishes the closing date at all. You register, you pay, and then you're told. Denmark's energy agency still shows its 4th CO2 storage tender as the current round. It closed in March 2025. Eighteen months on, and no award has been announced. None of this is hidden. It is all on regulator and operator sites. It just isn't on the page anyone thinks to check, and by the time a deadline reaches trade press it has usually lost the one detail that decides whether you can act on it. Acreage is a fortnightly record of every open oil and gas licensing round worldwide, plus CO2 storage and geothermal, and the jurisdictions closed to new entry. 85 entries across 56 jurisdictions. Every one carries its source and the date it was last checked. It's free, and it stays free.