OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – Applications for federal permits to drill on public and American Indian lands are expected to increase by close to 50 percent, U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar said Tuesday.

He also said he expects his agency to approve more offshore drilling permits in the coming days. Two offshore permits have been issued in the past two weeks after a nearly yearlong delay following energy company BP PLC's oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico.

Salazar said the federal Bureau of Land Management, which he oversees, will process more than 7,200 applications for Indian and public-land permits – up from 5,000 in 2010.

Salazar's comments at a news conference in Oklahoma City came as House Speaker John Boehner and other Republicans have blasted the Obama administration over rising gas prices, saying it has blocked efforts to increase domestic oil drilling and production and created a de facto moratorium on deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

“This is one of those sounds bites that makes it easy for critics of the administration to latch on to the reality of rising gas prices,” Salazar said. “We don't control the price of oil. That's set on the global markets, and I think when you look at the statistics relating to production and the efforts we've had to move forward with oil and gas, I think they speak for themselves.”

Still, Salazar said that, at the request of President Barack Obama, the Interior Department is looking at incentives for companies to begin production on the 70 percent of offshore leases not in production, as well as the 29 million acres onshore that aren't being developed.

He said 33 oil and gas lease sales are planned for 2011 – the same as in 2012. The sales will supplement the 41 million acres of public lands already leased for exploration and development, of which about 12 million acres are in production.

“It's important for us to recognize that the inventory that has been leased out to oil and gas companies is 41 million acres and only 12 million of that has been developed at this point, so that means there's a huge amount of inventory of public lands where there has been interest on the part of oil and gas companies to lease those lands and they have in fact been leased,” he said.

Offshore, Salazar said the two permits that have been granted included subsea containment programs.

Despite the halt in offshore drilling, Salazar said oil production increased by more than a third on the Outer Continental Shelf – from 446 million barrels in 2008 to an estimated 600 million barrels in 2010.

“So even though in the last year there was a significant national crisis we had to deal with based on the Gulf oil spill, we continued to produce significant amounts of oil from the Outer Continental Shelf,” he said.

Bob Abbey, director of the Bureau of Land Management, said the agency generates $112 billion for the U.S. economy, with $103 billion of that coming from the management of minerals. Leasing reforms, such as a controversial new wilderness protection policy, have heavily reduced the number of land sales that have drawn protests, he said.