oil and gas

Fossilized Finances: State and Federal Oil and Gas Subsidies in the Permian Basin

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.

Fossil Fuel Subsidy Reform: What Role for the World Trade Organization?

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.

12 Guilty Fogeys: Big Oil’s $86 billion offshore tax bonanza

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).

Pipelines or Progress: Government support for oil and gas pipelines in Canada

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.

Effect of subsidies and regulatory exemptions on 2020–2030 oil and gas production and profits in the United States

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.

Investment Disclosures by Asset Class: Current Practice at Harvard Compared to Other Large Funds

Harvard has the largest university endowment in the world.  Its investments are run by the affiliated Harvard Management Company (HMC), which operates under the Treasurer of the University and the Harvard Corporation.  The University has committed that the endowment will be net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.  The stature of both the University and its endowment mean that real innovations in investment tracking, measurement, and selection would have enormous ripple effects across many other large investors.  At present, however, there have been no interim milestones publicly announce

How subsidies aided the US shale oil and gas boom

 

This analysis looks at the last two decades of investment data for US oil and gas fields to evaluate how major federal subsidies may have played a role in the huge boom in US oil and gas production. It finds that federal subsidies amplified the expected financial returns of investing in unconventional oil and gas development, thereby helping to spur and sustain the US shale boom over the last two decades.

Banking on Climate Change: Fossil Fuels Report Card 2019

Adding up lending and underwriting from 33 global banks to the fossil fuel industry as a whole reveals stark findings: Canadian, Chinese, European, Japanese, and U.S. banks have financed fossil fuels with $1.9 trillion since the Paris Agreement was adopted (2016 to 2018), with financing on the rise each year. Fossil fuel financing is dominated by the big U.S. banks, with JPMorgan Chase as the world’s top funder of fossil fuels by a wide margin.