Mapping in GOMsmart has expanded in a number of ways throughout 2026, particularly in the last couple of months. This includes new ways of accessing the map, more tools and options, and greater customization, including with AskSmart.
With all of these changes, the next GOMSmart webinar will focus on the Smart Map. This free webinar, which will be held Tuesday, Sep. 15, is recommended for both new and experienced users to keep up with the many features available.
Selection of King/Horn Mt. in Smart Map
Along those lines, it's important to mention a pair of new tools added in the last week. As shown below, a new tool enables measuring either distances or areas within the map. Also, a scale bar is now in the bottom right corner for a quick view of the map scale.
Measuring area in the Smart Map.
Sale BBG3, while not particularly large, fit the ESA forecast well (available in GOMsmart). In this case, none of the blocks receiving bids in the deepwater were far enough away from existing leases to not receive a forecast. The A group of blocks, those in the top five percent of the distribution and therefore most likely to receive bids, overwhelmingly did so, with nine of eleven receiving bids. While the B, C, and D groups did not perform as well, there were relatively few bids overall, so the strong performance of the A group was a good result.
The map below shows the difference between the actual bid amount and the forecasted amount. Those in red were closest (within $300,000) and those in pale yellow were over $1,000,000 off. The bids at AC380 and AC424 are a good example of one of the difficulties in forecasting the amounts. The forecast for each was just over $3 million, but the actual bid for AC380 was over $7 million while the adjacent AC424 was under $900,000. Statistically they were similar, but with very different bids in the end.
Difference between forecast and actual bid amounts.
There are also a few changes made to upcoming bid forecasts, beginning with the one for BBG4. A new global variable has been introduced in the bid amount model to account for resource depletion gulf-wide. This has fit well with decreasing bid amounts over the last few years. Also, the training period has been set to include all sales from 2012 on. This accounts for the last change to the minimum required bid amount and provides the maximum training data for each sale moving forward.