Correction: This version corrects the spelling of Albert Eckel's name.

Public comments about the Obama Administration's proposed sale of leases for oil and gas exploration off the southeast Atlantic U.S. coast will continue to be collected through the end of March. But if Tuesday's Wilmington meetings on the issue were any indication, federal energy officials should be hearing plenty of feedback in the coming weeks.

The federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management held an informational open house at the Blockade Runner Beach Resort in Wrightsville Beach and drew hundreds of people. BOEM officials set up a series of stations around the hotel’s large dining room to educate attendees about the areas under consideration for leasing, how the proposed leasing program would be conducted and how the scoping process works.

After visiting the stations and talking with BOEM representatives, attendees were given the opportunity to submit their comments, either in writing or electronically. Comments from the public stating concerns, support or issues they’d like to see considered will be taken into consideration as BOEM drafts the leasing proposal’s environmental impact statement.

“People are mostly here to get information on how the process works and what we are going to do going forward,” said Sam Cable, a program analyst with BOEM, who staffed a station that displayed maps of the proposed lease tracts and detailed how the leasing program would progress.

BOEM spokeswoman Connie Gillette said in an email Wednesday that about 400 people attended the meeting during its four-hour span.

"We received over 70 comments via the website during the meeting. We had an additional 79 comments submitted in writing last night," she said in the email. "We haven't analyzed the comments yet, so I can't tell you what they said."

Gillette said that BOEM is still "early in the process, so we are really trying to encourage people to provide input. This comment period ends on March 30th." Comments can be submitted electronically to the bureau.

The Wrightsville Beach scoping meeting drew almost twice as many people as BOEM's two previous such sessions combined, according to Gillette. One session was in Washington, D.C., and one in Norfolk, Virginia earlier this month.

"Of the people that attended the two prior meetings it seemed like the groups were about 50/50 on whether they were opposed or supporting leasing in the Atlantic," she said.

Elsewhere in the hotel Tuesday, several environmental groups rallied opposition to the oil and gas drilling proposal and held a short news conference at 5 p.m. headlined by New Hanover County Board of Commissioners chairman Jonathan Barfield.

Wilmington should be a “blue city,” not an “oil slick city,” Barfield told the crowd of nearly 200.

Earlier in the day, the N.C. Energy Forum hosted an Offshore Energy luncheon to present what executive director Albert Eckel called a “fact-based, not emotion-based” discussion of offshore energy development. The event, which Eckel said was attended by about 175 people including several local government officials, was originally to feature a talk by retired Rear Adm. Don Loren, the national liaison for Vets4Energy. Weather conditions prevented his travel, however.

In his place, Algenon Cash, minority outreach director of America's Energy Forum, spoke to the group, Eckel said, and focused on how energy is changing geopolitical realities around the world, with the U.S. emerging as the world's largest producer of natural gas and on pace to become the world's largest producer of oil.

Eckel, who also attended the BOEM scoping meeting, said Wednesday he thinks the bureau's move away from holding public forums to an informational open house format "took a lot of emotion out of the room."

He also said that he found some statements at the anti-drilling rally opposing use of all fossil fuels, to be "troubling."

"That's not a reasonable approach, to push for no fossil fuels," he said. "We all have an obligation to use resources in a responsible way."

Eckel added that, according to polls conducted by the N.C. Energy Forum of North Carolina registered voters shows that 72 percent of them - 55 percent of Democrats polled and 80 percent of Republicans polled - support offshore oil and gas exploration.