A glitch interrupted the first-ever U.S. livestream of an oil lease sale on Wednesday, and although it didn’t affect the bidding, this epic fail provided just the right metaphor to describe the flop of the latest auction in the Gulf of Mexico, which saw a record low number of companies offering record-low money for leases in the western parts of the Gulf. Upon announcing in July the first-ever federal livestream of a lease sale , the U.S. Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) had said that the 23.8-million-acre area offshore Texas was estimated to have economically recoverable hydrocarbons of between 116 million and 200 million barrels of oil and between 538 billion and 938 billion cubic feet of natural gas. So far, so good. This week’s lease sale, however, showed the dismal stark reality: just three companies bid for 24 tracts covering 138,240 acres, with all bids […]