Net Profit Royalty Program to fuel oil and gas growth
COMMENT: Should be called the "set your own royalty program." It's an invitation to companies to pitch government on any petroleum opportunities that have yet to be exploited in BC.
But there's at least one logical abyss deeper than BC's deepest gas well inherent in the program. The greenhouse gas initiatives announced in the Throne Speech and Energy Plan in February, 2007, said we'd be reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Yet everything the Ministry of Energy, Mines, and Petroleum Resources does with respect to oil and gas is geared to more production of greenhouse gas emitting fuels.
I'm sorry to keep harping on this contradiction, but it stares British Columbians in the face at every turn. If the greenhouse gas reduction program is like an anti-smoking poster on the front door of the school, then MEMPR's oil and gas programs are like classes in every room on tobacco agriculture, manufacturing and marketing cigarettes, alternative smokable substances.
The "net royalty" program is the room where we'll find the guys who scavenge for cigarette butts, the place where the policy framework is "whatever."
Information Bulletin
Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources
July 31, 2007 (amended August 3, 2007)
VICTORIA – British Columbia is launching a new Net Profit Royalty Program to encourage the development of oil and gas resources that have higher costs and technical complexity.
The Net Profit Royalty Program delivers on the BC Energy Plan commitment to create a vibrant, competitive oil and gas sector in British Columbia.
The Net Profit Royalty Program is distinct from existing targeted royalty programs. It will promote the development of resources that are unlikely to be developed otherwise by focusing on resources that are:
• technically complex, such as coalbed gas, tight gas and shale gas;
• remote from existing infrastructure;
• requiring enhanced recovery; or
• in the Interior Basins.
Targeted royalty programs introduced by the Province have helped to double drilling activity in Northeast British Columbia in the past six years and have increased the Province’s share of royalties.
In the past four years, incremental oil and gas royalties of more than $819 million dollars from targeted royalty programs have helped fund vital government services.
New regulations will be enacted to implement the new program this fall.
For more information about the Net Profit Royalty Program, visit
www.em.gov.bc.ca/subwebs/oilandgas/.
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Note: The online version of this information bulletin was amended on Aug. 3, 2007.
Media contact:
Jake Jacobs
Public Affairs Officer
Ministry of Energy, Mines and
Petroleum Resources
250 952-0628
250 213-6934 (cell)