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Environmental groups contend the administration is rewarding its financial backers by ignoring the acreage law while pushing more public lands into development.
"It's clear from the data that there is no reason for the Bush administration to issue leases on America's last remaining wild public lands, other than as a favor to their most generous political patrons," said Dave Alberswerth, public lands director for the Wilderness Society.
Lonnie, the BLM's assistant director, said administration officials have left enforcement of the acreage law to bureau officials in the states. He said agency officials are following the same policies they used in the Clinton administration.
Enforcement efforts consist mainly of annual record title checks by bureau officials in each state, Lonnie said. Companies near the limit are asked to produce a record of their holdings for review. But Lonnie said no attempt is made to verify that the record is complete unless there is reason to believe something has been omitted.
Congress limited oil and gas lease ownership in 1920 amid concerns that a few companies would monopolize mineral rights on public lands by cornering leases they did not intend to exploit. But changes in the law over the years and new interpretations have allowed companies to amass far more than the current 246,080-acre limit per state.
Legislation pending in Congress would remove any producing lease from that cap.
The top 25 of the more than 10,000 owners of oil and gas leases, for example, now control more than one-third of all leased acres and 37 percent of the acres in leases actually producing oil and gas, the AP analysis found.
The Yates family, through nearly three dozen companies, individuals and trusts operating out of the same building in Artesia, controls 2.7 million acres of oil and gas leases on public lands. That includes more than 1 million acres in Wyoming, more than 800,000 acres in New Mexico and more than 500,000 in Nevada.
"We pay very close attention to that acreage limitation and are in compliance with it all the time," said Randy Patterson, vice president for exploration at Yates Petroleum.
A dozen companies with Yates family members as officers show up in BLM lease owner records, all with the same address. When the General Accounting Office (news - web sites), the investigative arm of Congress, questioned the arrangement in 1994, the bureau's chief lawyer ruled the law does not require that lease holdings of affiliated companies or individuals be counted together.
The acreage limit applies to individuals and their share of leases held by corporations in which they own more than 10 percent. When the bureau last audited individual holdings in the Yates family businesses eight years ago in Wyoming, it found no violations of the acreage cap.
Large public corporations cannot take advantage of the law the way the Yates family does because their subsidiaries are considered part of the company and their combined lease holdings must be below the state acreage limit.
Both big oil companies and independent operators have another way to amass lease holdings in excess of the state limit. They can enter into agreements with other companies, approved by the government, to develop the oil or gas on several adjoining leases as a unit under fairly strict controls. In return, they get to exclude that acreage from the cap.
Tom Brown, for example, owns 378,790 acres of oil and gas leases on public lands in Colorado, but more than 260,000 acres are excluded from the cap because of such agreements. Encana owns more than 400,000 acres of leases in Colorado, but only 155,715 are counted against the acreage limit.
In all, Encana controlled more than 1 million acres of federal oil and gas leases in March; Tom Brown controlled 856,887 acres.
Other companies that have been in violation of the acreage cap in recent years, all in Wyoming, are BP Amoco, Devon Energy Corp., and Marathon Oil. The combined public land oil and gas leases of those companies in March were 645,969 acres by Devon, 446,615 by BP Amoco, and 358,611 by Marathon.
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