Word: wellhead
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...Wellhead tax The central feature of the Administration program, the tax would be phased in over three years and raise domestic crude-oil prices, now at an average $8.52 per bbl., to the current OPEC price of about $13.50 per bbl. The aim: to discourage domestic oil consumption. To encourage increased domestic production and reduce imports, the plan would allow the price of newly discovered oil to rise to the 1977 OPEC level, and the oil companies to retain the increased revenue. To lessen the draining effect of the wellhead tax on consumer spending power Carter proposed that much...
...House went along with the scheme, with slight modifications but the Senate rejected it. Instead, it proposed a $47 billion package to general revenue grants and subsidies to help industry convert from oil heating to coal, and to aid energy companies in developing unconventional sources like shale oil. The wellhead-tax dispute is the most difficult issue the conference committee faces. Supporters of the tax argue that without it, the oil companies would be handed a bonanza of unearned profits because they would get much more for oil that had already been discovered and was already profitable to sell...
...half the oil we consume." On a swing through Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland and Seattle, HEW Secretary Joseph Califano strayed from his talks on welfare problems to argue that the poor would suffer most if the Senate failed to approve Carter's plan to rebate the wellhead tax on crude oil to consumers. Califano protested that less well-to-do Americans would not be compensated for the higher price of their heating oil under Senate bills...
Despite the Finance Committee's action, the wellhead tax is not dead. The House has approved the tax, and when the House-Senate conference meets, it may well be resurrected. What form it might take is anybody's guess. The conference could adopt Carter's rebate plan, Long's trust-fund scheme, or, what seems to many observers to be the most sensible compromise of all, a plan to rebate some of the money to consumers and some to the oil and gas companies...
...this reason the Administration has decided that the price hikes should be brought about by a wellhead tax. The yield from the tax would be enormous-as much as $12 billion a year by 1985. The oil industry has been lobbying Congress intensively all summer either to drop the tax or to hand all such revenues back to the oil companies for new investment in developing fresh oil sources. But the Administration remains skeptical of the industry's motives...