Just a few years ago, I was visiting our projects in these Alaska shops. They were so busy with work on State and Native Land.
Alaska's new tax structure has shut down many projects and jobs over the last few years.
Posted on 03/26/2012 7:11:24 AM PDT by thackney
Just a few years ago, I was visiting our projects in these Alaska shops. They were so busy with work on State and Native Land.
Alaska's new tax structure has shut down many projects and jobs over the last few years.
Yep, greedy politicians and citizens are killing industry in this state.
from here
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/us/politics/18palin.html
Even as she casts herself as an energy expert and is quick to attack the Obama administration on oil and gas issues, the two most prominent energy policies she put in place as governor of Alaska face new challenges less than two years after she left office.
Gov. Sean Parnell, Ms. Palin’s fellow Republican and former lieutenant, has announced that it is his top priority to undo parts of major oil tax increases that Ms. Palin made law. He argues that high state taxes, not just federal regulations, are preventing oil companies from exploring new drilling in Alaska and therefore jeopardizing future state revenues.
“Lower taxes means more competitive,” Mr. Parnell said last week. “It means more jobs.”
And the project Ms. Palin once portrayed as her principal legislative triumph, a plan to build a 1,700-mile natural gas pipeline that she said would transform the economy of Alaska and contribute to America’s domestic energy supply, seems an increasingly distant dream, undercut by low gas prices and more practical projects in other states.
from here
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=2863934%2C2
Palin Boosted Oil-Company Taxes While Alaska Had Budget Surplus
By Alison Fitzgerald - September 6, 2008 00:01 EDT
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) — Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who has joined the Republican national ticket as a tax-cutter, was a driving force in raising a tax on oil companies last year that will help swell the state’s budget surplus.
from here
http://www.freerepublic.com/perl/post?id=2863934%2C2
Palin Boosted Oil-Company Taxes While Alaska Had Budget Surplus
By Alison Fitzgerald - September 6, 2008 00:01 EDT
Sept. 6 (Bloomberg) — Alaska Governor Sarah Palin, who has joined the Republican national ticket as a tax-cutter, was a driving force in raising a tax on oil companies last year that will help swell the state’s budget surplus.
The tax increase by the Palin Administration was part of the reason we left Alaska and returned to Texas.
Strangely, back in Texas, I'm now working some smaller Alaskan North Slope projects. They are not associated with additional production but greater maintenance on the existing aging facilities.
Do you really believe that is the reason?
What companies have shut down projects and why wasn’t the natural gas pipeline started when prices were high? The remains that Ak’s natural gas doesn’t require tracking and should be more profitable.
The fact is that Federal regulations have been the biggest obstruction to new oil and gas in AK, in areas of known reserves.
So when Irwin and Palin raised the tax on oil is was on oil produced on state lands.
The nat gas pipeline would have been built or will be built to carry nat gas produced on state land.
The other conflict that Irwin and Palin created was over reclassifying Point Thompson from being stranded to not being stranded.
So it is not just Palin raising the oil tax that needs to be undone, but also Palins pipeline deal needs to be undone and Palin's Point Thompson deal needs to be undone.
_______________________________________
The oil companies said that this would be the result of Palin's add-on taxing of profits.
seattle Times August 2008...
"BP Alaska, which runs Prudhoe Bay, said earlier this year that it had delayed the development in the western region of the North Slope as a result of the tax. ConocoPhillips cited the same reason for scrapping a $300 million refinery project. "What the tax has done is take away all the upside," said Doug Suttles, president of BP Alaska. The U.K.-based oil company paid more than $500 million in taxes to Alaska last quarter — far more than it earned in profits from Alaskan oil, according to Suttles. Investment dollars are flowing instead to places that have a better return, like the massive deep-water projects offshore in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico, where ConocoPhillips said the government take equals less than 50 percent of the barrel."
As for the pipeline, not one shovel of dirt has been moved to date. Palin committed $500 million of Alaska taxpayer dollars to TransCanada to cover the cost of development...regardless of whether the pipeline ever gets built.
It is these two policy disasters that, along with her resignation, turned many of us against her.
Yes, I was there, leading an engineering group in Alaska doing mostly North Slope projects. Projects that were in the early stages (ie. had not begun buying equipment) were shut down and the project team members were out of work.
What companies have shut down projects
ConocoPhillips, BP, Marathon, Pioneer, Chevron, TAPS. Every operating company I was aware of shutdown early stage projects.
why wasn’t the natural gas pipeline started when prices were high?
It had been started for years. There is a lot of study, survey, calculation to evaluate the options. My company had been hired a couple of times to participate in the studies.
The natural gas line is dead to the south. The project that Palin dedicated $500 million to begin engineering on is no longer economically feasible due to the tremendous amount of Natural Gas in the lower 48 from the new shale fields.
The fact is that Federal regulations have been the biggest obstruction to new oil and gas in AK, in areas of known reserves.
In Federal lands, yes. But the non-Federal lands in Alaska is about the size of California. There has been a lot of interest in building in the Brook Range foothills by smaller independents. But as long as the taxes are so high, they are going to invest in North Dakota, Texas, Canada where most of the dollars are not eaten up in Taxes.
I’m going to defend what Palin did here back in 2007 and 8.
Aside from dumping a huge surplus into Alaska’s coffers, ACES was a reasonable response to a deeply corrupt political culture, as was Palin’s stillborn attempt to build the pipeline through Canada. Both were victims of changing market conditions, especially in North Dakota. However, few people recall that petrol prices were well north of $120.00 a barrel in the Spring of 2008 when ACES passed. Now it needs adjusting down so Alaska can attract business back from the Dakotas.
It’s for Parnell to change the ACES structure to lower the tax to keep AK competitive with North Dakota and other shale states in the lower 48. The Bakken Formation is simply too productive for Alaska to keep the old structure that worked quite well through 2009. Indeed, had Palin remained Governor, she probably would have revisited ACES given the competitive pressures of the North Dakota oil and LNG industry.
ACES was in no way, shape or form a reasonable response. The empty shops prov that while Texas and North Dakota cannot get enough workers, housing, etc.
They are strangling their golden goose.
Yep. She fell victem to the mob mentality on this topic. I keep telling people, it’s hard enough to work in the conditions we have in this state and raping the producers isn’t going to help us out. They are going to continue to look elsewhere for cheaper solutions until we pull our heads out and work together. Let Capitalism reign!
“ACES was a reasonable response to a deeply corrupt political culture”
Were there any alternatives to ACES? I like Sarah, but I think that she may have made a mistake there.
“It is these two policy disasters that, along with her resignation, turned many of us against her. “
I like Sarah, but she made a mistake in those two areas.
I am assuming you mean proposed alternatives, as there are always other choices that could be made.
At the time, there were many different plans being proposed; but Palin fever at the time over-ran common sense.
At the time it was put in place, for every additional dollar in price, about 90¢ of that went to government. It was insane under any type of reasoned analysis.
Just out of curiosity, do you think that if Sarah had stayed Gov. that she would have recognized ACES as the mistake it was?
Are you trying to get the Palin worshipers to stone me?
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