WASHINGTON — Under pressure from Republican lawmakers, the Obama administration is considering whether to reinstate more than a third of the 77 controversial oil- and gas-drilling leases near national parks in the Mountain West that were issued under President George W. Bush and blocked once President Barack Obama entered the White House.

Obama’s Interior Department, in a report released Thursday, sharply criticized the process by which those leases were auctioned in the waning days of the Bush administration.

But the report also opened the door for the department to reinstate or re-auction 30 leases on parcels that lie in existing oil and gas development areas or are “not near particularly sensitive landscapes."

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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/headline/biz/6477003.html

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