An online auction for Nevada oil leases this week brought in about $152,000 for the state and the Bureau of Land Management, the federal agency reported Wednesday. But land managers, who are tasked with offering federal land for oil and gas development each quarter, received bids on only about one-third of the 67,798 acres they made available in Elko, Eureka and Nye counties.

Anyone can nominate parcels in Nevada for 10-year oil and gas leases. Once the BLM receives these so-called Expressions of Interest, it conducts an environmental analysis and puts the parcels up for auction. There were 39 parcels included in this week’s sale, but only 11 received bids.

WildEarth Guardians, a Denver-based environmental group, protested the sale on the grounds that the BLM was opening up public lands where there was little known oil and gas potential.

“We protest the BLM’s proposal to offer all of the aforementioned oil and gas lease parcels for competitive sale on the basis that the proposed leasing runs afoul of the agency’s own statutory requirements for oil and gas leasing, which allow leasing only where there is known or believed to be oil and gas deposits,” Jeremy Nichols, the group’s energy director wrote in a letter to BLM.

The BLM has argued in the past that it has statutory authority to conduct these sales. Of the parcels that received bids, two went for $14 per acre, seven times more than the minimum bid, suggesting that there was some demand for the land and competition among the bidders.

In a press release, the BLM said the leases “support domestic energy production and American energy independence… The sales are also in keeping with the administration’s America First Energy Plan, which includes development of fossil fuels and coal, as well as renewable energy.”

Conservationists argued that the sale and eventual development of the land could harm wildlife.

“BLM has consistently short-cut America’s bedrock environmental quality rules in order to facilitate massive giveaways of our public land to the oil industry,” Patrick Donnelly, Nevada state director at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a statement Wednesday. “This particular lease sale included tens of thousands of acres of important sage grouse habitat.”