[Armageddon]

Who's making out like bandits are oil producers who buy our oil, from our USA government down in the gulf, for $25/ bbl and are selling it to us for $91 per bbl.

Heard this from another message board

[Bas]

to be honest I have no clue how this is settled in the US.

[Plantagenet]

No, its not true. But it might fool some people.

[Armageddon]

They called it royalties for drilling in the US

[Bas]

here's an interesting 2006 article on it from the NY times:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'N')ew projections, buried in the Interior Department's just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.

[Plantagenet]

Royalties are a tax or payment usually determined periodically as a percentage of gross or net sales derived from use of the asset or a fixed price per unit sold. A royalty interest is the right to collect a stream of future royalty payments, often used in the oil industry to describe a percentage ownership of future production or revenues from a given leasehold, which may be divested from the original owner of the asset.

[Plantagenet]

"But what seemed like modest incentives 10 years ago have ballooned to levels that have alarmed even ardent supporters of the oil and gas industry, partly because of added sweeteners approved during the Clinton administration but also because of ambiguities in the law that energy companies have successfully exploited in court."

--from Bas's NY Times link


Congress should stop wasting everybody's time showboating and debating the genocide in Turkey 90 years ago, and get to work passing new laws to end the royalty relief on oil put in place during the Clinton administration.

[Kylon]

You do realiZe that distracting the public from any real issues so that they can enforce and impose graft in the favor of wealthy private individuals and institutions is congress' job right?

In today's day and age, that's THEIR JOB.

Don't expect anything more or less until the people start punishing government corruption with cruel and unusual punishment to private individuals, or as government officials like to call it "enhanced interrogation".