US oil and gas companies pay significantly more tax to foreign petrostates than to the US federal government. In a particularly stark example, ExxonMobil reported paying nearly five times as much tax to the United Arab Emirates as to the US federal government in 2023 and 2024.
The scale of federal subsidies for fossil fuel production remain staggering, at nearly $35 billion per year. The subsidies, which divert needed funds from critical social services, come in the form of tax breaks, below-market access to drilling on public lands, regulatory loopholes, direct spending to clean up the industry’s mess, and more. The report also contains the most comprehensive list to date of the more than $4 billion in new fossil fuel subsidies added this year by Congress via the "One Big Beautiful Bill" (OBBA) that passed in July.
This memo provides updated subsidy estimates and background information on three subsidies benefiting the oil and gas industry. These include 45Q tax credits for carbon capture, utilization and storage (CCUS); tax exemptions for Master Limited Partnerships (MLPs), used heavily by the oil and gas sector; and the federal Strategic Petroleum Reserve. The memo also highlights an emerging risk area: the use of tax-exempt corporate structures for carbon sequestration activities.
The Permian is by far the largest oil producing basin in the United States and the second largest for natural gas. Firms in the region have been highly profitable, yet have continued to benefit from a wide array of government subsidies. Some of the subsidies have been in place for decades, though new ones continue to be introduced as well. All of the subsidies work against the need to decarbonize our economy and erode the competitive positioning of lower-carbon substitutes.
Even California has scores of policies and programs with the potential to subsidize oil and gas exploration, production, refining, transport, and consumption. These conflict with the state's long-term commitment to be a clean energy leader.
The removal of fossil fuel subsidies (FFS) would bring about many important and positive effects, among them helping to reduce air pollution and emissions of greenhouse gases that cause climate change and improving government’s finances. It could also reduce distortions affecting trade in not only the subsidized products, such as coal, fuel oil and natural gas, but also in goods that compete with fossil fuels, such as wind turbines and solar photovoltaic panels.
Multinational firms often use complicated corporate structures and arcane provisions of the tax code to minimize or eliminate their global tax payments. Arcane changes in tax rules can give rise to big losses in tax revenues to country treasuries, as happened in the 2017 tax law passed under the Trump Administration, to the great benefit of oil and gas firms. Under this law, companies that extract oil and gas overseas enjoy special exemptions within the Global Intangible Low-Tax (GILTI) regime covering Foreign Oil and Gas Extraction Income (FOGEI).
The author examined support by provincial and federal governments in Canada to three major pipeline projects, none of which has been completed to date. At least eight different types of financial support measures provided for Trans Mountain, two for Keystone XL, and two for Coastal GasLink. Cumulatively, Canadian governments have provided over CAD 23 billion in government support since 2018. Of this, over CAD 11 billion is in loans, and at least CAD 10 billion is loan guarantees or liabilities.
The United States has supported the development of its oil and gas industry since the early twentieth century. Despite repeated pledges to phase out 'inefficient' fossil fuel subsidies, US oil and gas production continues to be subsidized by billions of dollars each year. In this study, we quantify how 16 subsidies and regulatory exemptions individually and altogether affect the economics of US oil and gas production in 2020–2030 under different price and financial risk outlooks.