(DCNF)—The Bureau of Land Management held a federal oil and gas lease sale in the Delaware Basin of southeastern New Mexico on May 20 that shattered every previous record. The final tally exceeded $4 billion in high bids and rental payments, more than four times the prior New Mexico lease sale record of $972 million. Devon Energy alone committed roughly $2.6 billion, demonstrating that even after industry consolidation, companies remain eager to secure high-quality Permian acreage.
“Big Oil” and the feds aren’t the real winners here. The real winners are the people of New Mexico.
Here’s why: Under federal law, the state receives 50 percent of all bonus payments from these leases. That means New Mexico’s government just received an immediate $2 billion infusion. For perspective, the state’s total general fund budget for fiscal year 2026 is $10.8 billion. That’s a 19% boost from a single auction. These funds are primarily directed to K-12 education, higher education, and healthcare programs serving New Mexico’s people.
And that’s only the beginning. The state will also receive 50 percent of all future federal royalty payments from production on these leases. The Delaware Basin remains America’s most prolific shale play, with exceptional well productivity and long reserve lives. A lease sale of this scale could generate billions of dollars in additional royalties for New Mexico across the coming decades.
Energy development has long been the backbone of New Mexico’s state government, funding more than 40% of its budget per a recent legislative report. The state has historically struggled with underfunded schools, rural poverty, and healthcare access. This massive windfall arrives at a time when those needs remain pressing.
Critics often portray oil and gas activity as a corporate giveaway that leaves communities with environmental damage and little benefit. The reality in Eddy and Lea counties tells a different story. Over the past decade, the Delaware Basin has transformed from a quiet desert region into one of the world’s most productive hydrocarbon provinces. Local tax bases have exploded. New schools have been built, roads paved, and hospitals expanded. Thousands of high-paying jobs have stabilized a region once plagued by outmigration.
This didn’t happen by government fiat. It happened because private companies invested billions of dollars of their own capital into public lands. They assumed the geological, technical, price, and political risks. In exchange, they pay substantial lease bonuses, rentals, royalties, and taxes. Taxpayers receive substantial revenue streams without bearing the capital risk—a textbook example of effective public-private partnership.
The timing of this sale is telling. Despite efficiency gains and lower costs, companies are still willing to pay record sums because the rock quality justifies it. Modern drilling techniques—longer laterals, improved completions, and better targeting—have made the Delaware Basin resilient even in moderate price environments. Devon’s big investment shows some companies are now ready to increase drilling in the current higher price paradigm.
Industry opponents will no doubt condemn the sale as another gift to “big oil.” They will ignore the statutory 50/50 revenue split with the state. They will overlook that these are multiple-use federal lands mandated by statute. And they will fail to note that New Mexico’s own Democratic-led government has been happy to accept the revenue even as it has so often moved to hamper the industry.
The irony is clear. For years we’ve been told to rapidly phase out oil and gas in favor of renewables. Yet every competitive federal lease sale demonstrates robust market demand for responsible domestic production. Yes, companies benefit, but so do teachers, nurses, students, and working families across New Mexico.
We can hope this $2 billion windfall will serve as an object lesson to the state’s policymakers. Blocking future lease sales, imposing punitive taxes, or adding unnecessary regulations doesn’t just punish “Big Oil”: It punishes the citizens who depend on these revenues for schools, hospitals, and infrastructure.
When the industry is allowed to operate on American soil under reasonable rules, the public wins decisively. More lease sales like this will strengthen the state’s finances, improve public services, and support long-term economic stability.
This isn’t rhetoric—it’s arithmetic. Last Wednesday, the numbers added up to $2 billion, and more to come, in favor of New Mexico and its people.
David Blackmon is an energy writer and consultant based in Texas. He spent 40 years in the oil and gas business, where he specialized in public policy and communications.
The views and opinions expressed in this commentary are those of the author and do not reflect the official position of the Daily Caller News Foundation.
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Two Storms, One Harvest
Every food crisis in living memory has been a one-shock event. The 2008 price spike was a commodity bubble. The 2020 shortages were a logistics failure. The 2022 grain scare was a war on one exporter’s ports. Each time, the system bent, adjusted, and recovered, and each time the experts assured us afterward that global markets are simply too big and too diversified to fail.
What nobody in Washington seems eager to discuss is that 2026 is shaping up to be something the modern food system has never actually faced. Two independent shocks, one climatic and one geopolitical, are converging on the same harvest cycle at the same time. Not sequentially. Simultaneously.
Start with the weather. The Pacific Ocean is currently building toward what forecasters now openly call a record event. NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center puts the odds of at least a strong El Niño near 88 percent, with roughly two in three odds it reaches “very strong” status, the tier reserved for perhaps three or four events in the entire satellite era. Every major global model now projects a median peak in Super El Niño territory, and most of them project it exceeding the 2015-16 event, which until now held the modern record. Sea surface anomalies were already brushing the super threshold in mid-July, months before these events normally peak. The atmosphere has already shifted into El Niño mode, and the event is forecast to crest in late fall and early winter.
This is not about “climate change.” It’s about the standard cycles of weather, and the cycle we’re currently in is one that has likely devastated societies in the past. We’re better prepared as a society today, but not all Americans are equally prepared.
Serious households have started doing the quiet math on their own. Grocery bills tell part of the story, and the forecast maps tell the rest, which is why long-term food storage has moved from fringe hobby to mainstream line item in the family budget, with established suppliers like Heaven’s Harvest seeing demand from people who five years ago would have rolled their eyes at the idea. That instinct is not paranoia. It is pattern recognition, and the pattern is worth walking through carefully.
Editor’s Note: Heaven’s Harvest IS a sponsor, but the warnings of this article are real and would be written even if we didn’t have a survival food sponsor. With that said, those who take advantage of what they offer can use promo code “Patriot” for 15% off.
The Fertilizer Clock Is Already Running
While the Pacific warms, the second shock has been unfolding in the Strait of Hormuz. The conflict with Iran turned the world’s most important energy chokepoint into a contested waterway, and the consequences reach far beyond the gas pump. Roughly a third of global fertilizer trade moves through Hormuz, and the disruption sent urea prices up 86 percent year over year by March, with a 53 percent jump in a single month.
The World Bank projects energy prices rising about 24 percent in 2026 and fertilizer about 31 percent. By its own accounting, fertilizer prices ran 35 percent higher in the first five months of this year than the same period last year.
Here is the mechanism the nightly news will not explain. Fertilizer is not a grocery item. It is a time-delayed input. The nitrogen a farmer in Iowa or Punjab could not afford to apply this spring does not show up as a problem this spring. It shows up as a thinner harvest six to twelve months later.
The World Bank’s own food security brief concedes that the effects of reduced applications earlier this season “are likely to become visible only later in harvest outcomes.” Translate that from institutional language into plain English and it means this. The damage is already done, it is already in the ground, and we are simply waiting for it to arrive on the shelf.
Now check the calendar. Six to twelve months from the spring planting season lands us squarely in late 2026 and early 2027. Which is precisely when the strongest El Niño in the instrumental record is forecast to peak, bringing its signature droughts to Southeast Asia, Australia, southern Africa, northern Brazil, and South Asia, the very regions that grow the world’s rice, sugar, and oilseeds.
The World Bank warns openly that a strong El Niño “could disrupt multiple crop belts simultaneously” on top of the conflict-driven input costs. Their baseline projection assumes the Middle East disruptions ease by autumn. What in the last two years of Middle East history suggests that assumption is safe?
The System Has No Slack Left
The comfortable answer is that global markets always adjust. But adjustment requires slack, and the slack is gone. Global cereal production is expected to decline from last year’s records even before El Niño does its work. The UN World Food Programme, hardly a den of right-wing preppers, is calling this the most significant disruption to its supply chains since Covid and the invasion of Ukraine, and its supply chain director put the stakes bluntly.
Today’s supply chain challenges are tomorrow’s hunger crisis.
There is also a political dimension that markets cannot price. When food gets scarce, governments do not behave like economists. They behave like politicians. Export bans, hoarding mandates, and panic buying at the national level turned the modest rice shortfall of 2008 into a global crisis, and analysts are already warning that import-dependent nations are the first dominoes.
The 2015-16 Super El Niño, a far weaker event than what is now forecast, threw tens of millions into food stress across Africa and Asia. This one is projected to be stronger, and it arrives with fertilizer already rationed by price and shipping lanes already contested by missiles.
What Joseph Knew
Scripture does not treat preparation for lean years as faithlessness. It treats it as wisdom delivered in advance to those willing to act on it.
Behold, there come seven years of great plenty throughout all the land of Egypt: And there shall arise after them seven years of famine; and all the plenty shall be forgotten in the land of Egypt.
Joseph did not respond to that warning with a hashtag or a committee. He stored grain during the years of abundance, and when the famine came, Egypt stood while its neighbors begged. The lesson is not that famine is certain. It is that the time to prepare is precisely when preparation still looks optional.
Nobody who filled a pantry in a year of plenty has ever regretted it, and nobody standing in an empty aisle has ever been glad he waited for certainty.
None of this calls for panic, and panic is the enemy of sound judgment anyway. It calls for the same unglamorous prudence our grandparents considered ordinary. Keep some cash margin, know your local growers, and put real food in deep storage while it is cheap and available, because the entire arc of this story is that cheap and available is a closing window.
Families looking for a straightforward place to start can visit Heaven’s Harvest and use promo code Patriot for 15 percent off long-term storable food. The forecasts may yet soften, the strait may yet reopen, and we should pray they do. But hope is a fine thing to hold and a foolish thing to eat.
