By Owen Paine on Friday May 19, 2006 01:06 PM
Evidence of the sea change
hits big energy
in the
New York Times today.
Imagine 85 Repubs voting to close a loop hole that allows the big oilers to
pocket billions that ought to be Uncle's. Nice. But nicer still is this tidbit, buried
near the end of the story:
The windfall stemmed in large part from a major error in about 1,000 leases that the Clinton administration signed with energy companies in 1998 and 1999."Error," huh? Nice choice of words there. Ooops, there goes what, maybe $80 billion over ten years. What do you want to bet that "error" got somebody a really nice private-sector sinecure?To encourage drilling and exploration in water thousands of feet deep, the government offered to let companies avoid the standard royalties, usually 12 percent or 16 percent of sales, for large quantities of the oil and gas they produced.
But the incentives... were supposed to stop as soon as prices for oil climbed above $34 a barrel and prices for natural gas climbed above $4 per thousand cubic feet.
For reasons that are now being investigated, the Interior Department omitted the restriction in 1,000 leases it signed in 1998 and 1999.
