Five areas of Pacific seabed adding up to 67 million acres go to an oral auction in December, at a floor of $3m each and no rent at all for the first five years

67,197,032 acres.

That is the sum of the five areas the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management proposed on Monday to offer for bid around the Northern Mariana Islands, at a sale it wants to hold on December 16. Two areas lie east of the islands and three lie west. The eastern pair comes to 33,855,120 acres and the western three to 33,341,912.

What a lease would convey

Not oil and not gas. Both are reserved to the government by regulation, along with sulphur and source materials for fissionable materials. What a winning bidder gets is the chance to identify and then seek approval to develop polymetallic nodules, ferromanganese crust deposits and marine sulfide deposits, plus anything produced incidentally with them.

The primary term is 20 years.

The money

The minimum bonus bid is $3,000,000 for each area offered. Five areas at the floor comes to $15m, and the format is an in-person ascending oral clock auction taken one area at a time, so the floor is where the bidding starts rather than where it ends.

Rent starts at zero. Nothing is due for the first five years on any of the five areas. From year six it runs 30 cents an acre for a lessee that has handed back most of what it took, rising to $1.20 an acre for one still holding half of an eastern area or a quarter of a western one, and by years 16 to 20 those same three columns read $2.50, $5.00 and $10.00.

Royalty is where east and west part. On an eastern lease the rate is 2 percent of the value of production for the first five years of mining under an approved plan, and 5 percent from the sixth year onward. On a western lease it is 5 percent and then 7. Anything processed to a marketable condition or sold under a delineation or testing plan pays 5 percent from the start. The notice states that no royalty relief will be offered in this sale.

Fourteen stipulations, and one of them names a department

The stipulation headings run past the usual environmental list into industrial policy: Community Investment and Economic Development, Local Content and Labor Utilization, a Supply Chain Statement of Goals, Port Utilization and Infrastructure Investment, and Coordination with the Department of War, which is the wording on the page. The information to lessees adds a notice on assignment to the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States and a heading reading Domestic Mineral Processing and Supply Chain.

Who can bid, and by when

A bidder has to already hold a BOEM qualification number. The bidder's financial form is due November 18, and the agency will take it only by post, executed on paper with a wet signature. A deposit of 20 percent of the minimum bid, which the notice works out as $600,000 an area, has to reach the Office of Natural Resources Revenue by December 2, and anybody who wants the ability to win more than one area must lodge a separate deposit for each.

The auction is in or near Camarillo, California. The room is closed to the public. It will be live streamed on the agency website. The Justice Department and the Federal Trade Commission will review the results of the sale for antitrust issues before any bid is accepted and any lease is issued.

None of it is settled

The Governor of the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands has 60 days from publication to comment, and the filing carries a publication date of August 18. After that the Assistant Secretary for Land and Minerals Management decides whether and how to proceed. A final leasing notice has to appear at least 30 days before the sale. Interior reserves the right to revise both the areas offered and the terms attached to them.