BOEM Offshore Wind Lease Tracker — Inventory & Status Deltas

Track every active BOEM offshore wind energy lease on the US Outer Continental Shelf — lessee, state, acreage, block count, effective and expiration dates — plus BOEM's wind planning areas, straight from the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management's official ArcGIS layers (Office of Renewable Energy Programs). No API key, no scraping of protected sites.

The moat is the transform: a unified, normalized lease inventory and a built-in status delta monitor. Run it on a schedule in delta mode and it diffs the current inventory against the snapshot from the previous run, emitting only what changed — new leases (auction results), removed leases, status changes, and acreage changes (lease segmentations / assignments).

Who this is for

• Offshore-wind developers & analysts — watch competitor lease positions, new auction results, and acreage changes without polling BOEM by hand.
• Marine services & vessel operators (survey, cable-lay, crew transfer) — a new lease or acreage change is a sales trigger; know the lessee and state the day it lands.
• Energy market & policy analysts — per-state and per-lessee holdings rollups (total acreage, lease counts) saved with every run.
• GIS teams — clean lease centroids (WGS84), protraction numbers, and block counts ready to join to your own layers.

Example input

{
  "mode": "inventory",
  "states": ["CA", "New York"],
  "lessee": "RWE",
  "includePlanningAreas": true,
  "maxResults": 500
}

Run with empty input and you get the full national inventory (~52 active leases + ~19 planning areas) — bounded, fast, and cheap.

Delta mode

{ "mode": "delta" }

The first delta run seeds a snapshot in a named key-value store (boem-wind-lease-snapshots by default) and emits 0 rows. Every later run emits one row per change with change_type set to NEW, REMOVED, STATUS_CHANGED, or ACREAGE_CHANGED, plus previous_status / previous_acreage. Schedule it weekly and you have a BOEM offshore-wind change feed.

Output fields (per row)

Field	Meaning
record_type	WIND_LEASE or PLANNING_AREA
lease_number	BOEM OCS lease number, e.g. OCS-P 0561
area_name	Project name (leases) or planning-area name
lessee	Company holding the lease
region_or_state	Adjacent US state (normalized full name)
lease_type	Commercial / Research / Right of Way, or planning category
lease_status	Active for leases; BOEM AREA_STATUS for planning areas
acreage + acreage_is_approximate	BOEM's published acres, or geometry-derived (flagged)
block_count	OCS blocks/sub-blocks inside the lease
effective_date, expiration_date, lease_term_years	Lease dates (YYYY-MM-DD); expiration = effective + term
latitude, longitude	Lease centroid (WGS84)
protraction_number, project_names	Cadastral + project context
change_type, previous_status, previous_acreage	Delta mode only
source_layer, source_url	Provenance: BOEM layer + lease document / state page

Per-state and per-lessee rollups (lease counts, total acreage) are saved to the run's key-value store under the ROLLUP key on every run.

Use as an MCP tool

This actor is agent-ready: call it from Claude, Cursor, or any MCP client via mcp.apify.com. The input and output schemas are fully described field-by-field, so an AI agent can chain it — e.g. "list active BOEM wind leases off California, then diff next week" — without human glue code.

FAQ

Where does the data come from? BOEM's official hosted ArcGIS layers (owner BOEM_GeoSEAS, Office of Renewable Energy Programs): Offshore Wind Lease Outlines, Offshore Wind Planning Area Outlines, and the block-level Offshore Wind Leases layer. These are the same layers behind BOEM's public renewable-energy maps.

How current is it? The layers are maintained by BOEM and updated as leases are executed, assigned, or segmented. Each run reads them live.

Why do some acreage values say approximate? BOEM leaves ACRES null on a few records (e.g. right-of-way grants) and publishes none for planning areas. For those, acreage is derived from the lease geometry (Web-Mercator area corrected by cos² of latitude — validated within 0.01% of BOEM's own figures) and flagged with acreage_is_approximate: true.

What happened to the planning areas? BOEM rescinded its offshore wind planning areas on July 30, 2025. The outlines layer is still published with an AREA_STATUS field — this actor keeps tracking it, and delta mode will flag any status flips.

Is the expiration date official? It's computed as effective date + published lease term (e.g. 06/01/2023 + 33 Years → 2056-06-01). BOEM does not publish a per-lease expiration field; treat it as an estimate for lease-management purposes.

Can I track only my market? Yes — filter by states and/or lessee, and give each filtered universe its own snapshotStoreName so deltas stay independent.