oil and gas

The Inventory Of Estimated Budgetary Support and Tax Expenditure for Fossil Fuels 2013 collects details on more than 550 fossil fuel support measures in the 34 OECD member countries, including many provided by state and provincial governments. The report also highlights progress made and the benefits identified by a number of OECD countries in reforming support to fossil fuels in recent years. It updates an earlier report released in 2011.

Although data on fossil fuel subsidies around the world have been growing, most of this information focuses on national level policies.  The thousands of subsidies at the state, provincial or local levels are largely untracked -- with little visibility either in the United States or in most other countries of the world. 

Although the oil shale industry is still in its commercial infancy, it has a long history of government support that continues today. The Bureau of Land Management recently issued two new research, development, and demonstration leases and new federal regulations for commercial leases and royalty rates are expected any day. Before the federal government goes down that road it’s important to take a look back and ask whether we should be throwing good money after bad.

Despite a stated commitment to using market forces, the Romney campaign is turning a blind eye to large and distortionary subsidies to conventional fuels.  This review highlights problems with how Romney has framed the energy subsidy problem and highlights important subsidies to fossil fuels that he has ignored. 

The Government of India spent over US$ 9 billion subsidizing fuel products – diesel, kerosene, LPG and, to a lesser extent, gasoline – in 2010-11. The Government’s total subsidy expenditure (including for food and fertilizer) increased by nearly 27% in 2011-12, significantly contributing to the deterioration of India’s fiscal balance. In addition, national oil companies incurred over US$ 8 billion worth of under-recoveries.

Webinar slides prepared for the Vote Solar Initiative to provide an overview of fossil fuel subsidies.  The presentation discusses the informational gaps that often plague numbers on fossil fuel subsidies reported in the press, and provides a number of frameworks and tools to help Vote Solar members to more comprehensively assess that subsidies that competing projects may be receiving.

In this, our second review of progress in meeting this phase out commitment (an earlier review was published in November 2010), we reviewed formal submittals by member countries to the G20 and the WTO, reached out individually to staff from each member country, and reviewed third-party assessments of fossil fuel subsidies. We conclude that the G20 effort is currently failing. The following factors are the key reasons for this failure.

For the past decade imports of tar sands crude oil or bitumen have been increasing. Tar sands is stripmined and drilled in an energy‐and water‐intensive process from under the Boreal forests and wetlands of Alberta. In the process, Canada is destroying critical habitat while releasing three times the greenhouse gas emissions as conventional oil production.

The value of the Russian government’s support to the upstream oil and gas activities is very significant. The subsidies to oil and gas producers in Russia that have been identified and quantified in this report amounted to 4.2 per cent and 6.0 per cent of the total value of oil and gas production in Russia in 2009 and 2010 respectively. These subsidies also amounted to 8.6 per cent and 14.4 per cent of the industry’s total tax and other payments to the federal government in 2009 and 2010 respectively.