In addition to the volumes from Argos, we’re also seeing new volumes from additional subsea developments, such as Woodside’s Shenzi North project and Quarternorth’s Katmai project, both of which commenced production in the third quarter and will be online for a full year in 2024. These are yet again multiple examples of additional subsea tiebacks and or development opportunities that were discovered at or near existing fields on active and valid leases in the Gulf of Mexico. While there remains decades and decades of these types of incremental opportunities on or around existing infrastructure and on active and valid leases in the Gulf of Mexico, I wanted to touch briefly on some of the direct and indirect efforts to not follow longstanding laws passed by Congress in attempting to inhibit oil and gas activity in the Gulf of Mexico.
As many of you might have seen in the news over the last few months, the Department of Interior’s Lease Sale No. 261 was originally scheduled to occur on or before September 27th, but in August, the current administration announced it would shrink the leasing area by some 6 million acres due to some perceived risk to an endangered species. After multiple lawsuits, the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana blocked the restriction in order to sell to include the 6 million acres in question. The delay caused the Department of Interior to push the lease sale to November 8th. Then in late October, the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals stayed the earlier order until it reached a decision on the appeal of such order. In addition to challenges around Lease Sale No. 261, the administration is also trying to limit future lease sales in the Gulf of Mexico through the end of the decade to three lease sales versus the historical semi-annual lease sales that are required in the Outer Continental Shales Land Act passed by Congress in 1953.
While these efforts to impact federal leasing in the Gulf of Mexico are unfortunate, we do not believe they will play any significant role in impacting the short- to medium- to long-term outlook for Genesis in the Gulf of Mexico, given the tremendous amount of acreage that is already held by production and or held under existing and valid leases around our industry-leading footprint. We think it is interesting and important to understand the sheer size and scale of the Gulf of Mexico as a world-class hydrocarbon basin. According to the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, over 12.1 million acres in the Gulf of Mexico are held under active leases, with over 68% of them being located in the deepwater. Of these 12.1 million acres, production has been established under only 2.7 million acres, with the remaining 9.4 million acres under existing valid leases either held by production through unitization, which is commonplace in the Gulf since there is only one landowner and one royalty owner or under a primary 10-year lease term or under an already agreed extension of its primary lease term.
To put this in perspective, the 9.4 million acres of leased but as yet undeveloped acreage is more than 6.5 times the size of ExxonMobil’s total gross acreage position in the Permian Basin post their recent acquisition of Pioneer. Suffice it to say, there is a tremendous resource in the Gulf of Mexico that has yet to be explored under existing and valid leases, and it should undoubtedly provide for decades and decades of drilling inventory and future production volumes, a large percentage of which should find their way to our industry-leading infrastructure in the Central Gulf of Mexico. Furthermore, a study conducted by researchers at the University of California at Davis and Louisiana State University, published in May of 2023, found that more than 4.4 million oil and gas wells have been drilled in the United States.
