9:30 am Eastern Time
SOURCE: World Energy
U.S. Senate Considers Bill to Maintain 20% of U.S. Production; Bill Will Help Maintain Production in America's Marginal Wells, According to an Article in World Energy Magazine
HOUSTON, March 15 /PRNewswire/ -- The following was released today by World Energy magazine:
The Bill is called ''U.S. Energy Economic Growth Act'' and with crude oil prices at their lowest point in decades, thousands of marginal producing wells are in peril of being shut down, with that potential domestic production lost forever.
Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, (R-Tex) has introduced the U.S. Energy Economic Act to protect the half-million stripper wells that produce close to 20 percent of America's oil.
''A safety net in the form of a tax credit can offset the cost of keeping marginal wells operating at a time of low prices, and preserve hundreds of thousands of wells and thousands of U.S. jobs,'' Hutchison writes in the spring 1999 issue of World Energy magazine. (Copies are available at the WWW.WorldEnergySource.com)
Hutchison also called for the U.S. to begin purchasing U.S. crude to refill the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, a program that is now underway.
Hutchison's bill also seeks to restart inactive wells by offering producers a tax exemption for the costs of doing so. ''This would increase revenues paid by oil producers to the federal government,'' she notes, by increasing oil production that would be taxable and by increasing taxable job earnings.
As she explains in her article, there are already 17 bipartisan co- sponsors of the bill, and the Congressional Oil and Gas Caucus is urging Congress to take swift action.
Also in this issue, Peter Beadle tells how his company, BP Solar, views the future of solar-powered electricity, while former Commerce Secretary Robert Mosbacher explains why the administration must engage Venezuela's new president, former rebel Hugo Chavez.
World Energy publishes thought-provoking articles written by the heads of energy companies and other industry leaders worldwide. In this way, the magazine delivers an unfiltered view of what energy leaders are concerned with today -- and tomorrow.
World Energy is published by International Business Publishers, Inc., which also produces worldenergysource.com, a website that carries World Energy's content and more.
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Looks like the OPEC action will probably take the steam out of things like this. My guess is the many Congresspersons will say, "let's just wait a bit and see what oil prices do, before we start screwing with tax laws."
I wonder if OPEC took into account that low oil prices could cause some from for Government subsidies to protect their home oil industry? That would cause exporting countries to compete with companies getting Government aid, lowering oil prices still more. Maybe OPEC saw this sort of thing happening, and decided they've pushed the attack on higher cost producers as far as they could without causing a destructive backlash.
Mike
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