Democrats want to shift oil tax

Plan would cut oil incentives, boost federal royalties, give to green energy

WASHINGTON – House Democrats are crafting an energy package that would roll back billions of dollars worth of oil drilling incentives, raise billions more by boosting federal royalties paid by oil and gas companies for offshore production, and plow the money into new tax breaks for renewable energy sources, congressional sources said yesterday.

Eager to paint themselves as different from the Bush administration and the past Republican majority, Democratic leaders are targeting a manufacturing tax cut in 2004 that they say gave unneeded incentives to the oil industry, Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland said in a briefing yesterday. Hoyer said Democrats are also planning to force oil companies to pay royalties on deepwater Gulf of Mexico tracts leased in 1998 and 1999; the Interior Department has said that the leases inadvertently failed to include provisions for royalty payments once oil prices rose above certain thresholds.

The repeal of the 2004 tax cuts for the oil and gas industry would generate nearly $5 billion, Democratic lawmakers said, quoting estimates by the Joint Committee on Taxation. The royalty payments would yield between $9 billion and $11 billion, Hoyer said.

But energy industry and congressional sources said that the details of the package remain in flux, in part because of disagreements among Democrats over how the revenue would be used and whether to also roll back oil and gas industry incentives in the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which was supported by many Democrats.

Washington Post