By law is the American Samoa Government entitled to a share of Bureau of Ocean Energy Management lease revenue?

ANSWER FROM PERPLEXITY    

Not generally, no. Under current federal law, BOEM’s revenue-sharing rule for offshore renewable-energy projects pays 27 percent only to “eligible coastal States,” and the applicable federal definition includes American Samoa as a “State,” but only if the project and American Samoa meet BOEM’s eligibility and proximity rules for that specific lease area.

What The Law Says: OCSLA defines “State” to include American Samoa.

BOEM’s revenue-sharing regulation then says it distributes 27 percent of certain project revenues among “eligible coastal States,” and those shares are based on proximity to the project area under the inverse-distance formula.

What That Means For American Samoa: American Samoa is not automatically entitled to a fixed share of every BOEM lease.

It would have to qualify as an eligible coastal State for the particular project, and the revenue-sharing formula applies only to revenues from qualified projects under BOEM’s offshore renewable-energy framework.

For Offshore Minerals

For the current offshore critical-minerals context, I did not find a statute that clearly creates a GOMESA-style mandatory revenue share for the American Samoa Government.

BOEM materials about American Samoa discuss leasing and planning, but the sources I found do not show a specific enacted share of mineral-lease revenue to the territory.

Click here to view sources:

https://www.perplexity.ai/search/c3294012-05bf-478b-b5ba-ac741a53dbd3

(Perplexity is an AI-powered conversational search engine that provides direct, accurate answers to complex queries in real-time by scouring the web and citing sources. Unlike traditional chatbots, it acts as an "answer engine," using Retrieval -Augmented Generation [RAG] to minimize hallucinations and provide verifiable information for research.)