Oct. 5--Exploration results have been disappointing for decades, but there is still industry interest in the huge, 23 million acre National Petroleum Reserve-Alaska, as the U.S. Bureau of Land Management's Sept. 24 lease sale would seem to indicate.

The results of the sale were modest, but given the lack of major discoveries so far, sky-high costs in the remote area and the high tax rates in the state of Alaska's new oil production tax, that even a handful of companies showed up to bid was encouraging.

Small oil and gas accumulations have been found in the NPR-A, but no discoveries yet that are big enough to justify development.

The discovery that is nearest to commercial development is in the Moose's Tooth area of the northeast part of the reserve, where ConocoPhillips and Anadarko Petroleum have made several small- to medium-sized accumulations, some of which are planned for development with a pipeline extended from the producing Alpine oil field, which is on state and private lands nearby.

A small gas field discovered years ago near Barrow was developed by the federal government. It now supplies gas to the Barrow community, and is owned by the North Slope Borough. A small oil field was also discovered at Umiat, on the southeast border of the NPR-A, during exploration in the 1950s. It was too small to commercially produce, but in recent years independent company Renaissance Umiat LLC has been working on the prospect with an eye toward possible development.

Six companies participated in the BLM's Sept. 24 bidding, most of them firms with established leases and intrerest in the NPR-A. But there was also a company new to Alaska: Petro-Hunt LLC.

Bids submitted were relatively modest, most of them near the BLM's minimum asking price, and most tracts offered received only one bid. While the overall results of the sale were modest, the bidding demonstrated continued interest in the reserve.

Companies submitting bids Sept. 24 included ConocoPhillips Alaska Inc., Anadarko Petroleum Corp., PetroCanada, FEX LP (a subsidiary of Talisman Energy), Petro-Hunt and Renaissance Umiat.

Petro-Hunt dominated the sale, acquiring 57 leases of 150 tracts drawing bids. BLM offered a total of 187 tracts.

The high bid was $642,926, submitted on Lease D008, in the northeast part of the reserve, by Petro-Hunt. ConocoPhillips submitted the highest bid per acre, however, offering $62 per acre. Most companies in the bidding hold existing leases in NPR-A and bid mostly near their existing landholdings.

BLM received $30.96 million in high bids in the sale.