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in the UK north sea oil exploration is heavily subsidised It seems very misleading to say "taxpayer support" for a tax preference, especially when tax revenue

• ZeroGravitas 10y ago
  It's all accounting at the end of the day. The oil belongs to the nation, they're "hiring" industries to extract it. Whether it's called a tax or a payment is all semantics at some level. This is part of why Norway can make around £400 Billion more money than the UK from a similar amount of oil, extracted from basically the same place: http://www.resourcegovernance.org/blog/did-uk-miss-out-%C2%A3400-billion-worth-oil-revenue http://www.resourcegovernance.org/blog/did-uk-miss-out-%C2%A... See also "Hollywood Accounting".
  • CountSessine 10y ago
    From the linked page, about half of that £400bn is equity in state-owned oil companies with no stake in oil fields outside the north sea; as someone who lives in a country that had an albatross state-owned oil company, that's going to become a very interesting investment once those oil fields dry up in the next 20 years. The article itself says the rest is partly because of lower taxes on the oil industry, but mostly because 1. The peaks of oil production in the UK's and Norway's fields were at different times when the market price of oil was different. 2. Norway has fewer fields but more reserves which made extraction more efficient. It's also worth pointing out that the £6bn/year figure in the Independent article seems to be a bit of a wank too.