Is It Too Late for Colorado to Capture Billions of Dollars in Oil and Gas Tax Revenues in a Permanent Fund?

The production in the Bakken Formation raced upward to nearly half a billion barrels last year. Will this affect the oil & gas tax revenues?

The trust fund’s balance is expected to more than double over the next decade — to nearly $15 billion.

Three years before voters in North Dakota went to the polls. A committee of 11 Colorado state lawmakers is convening to take a look at how severance taxes were allocated in the Centennial State. After a half dozen meetings and a couple of field trips to mineral-rich Rio Blanco and Garfield counties, the group came to the conclusion that it would behoove Colorado to create a permanent trust fund “as a resource in the future when the mineral extraction industry declines.”

“Interest from a trust fund could also be used to provide additional resources for higher education to educate the state’s workforce,” the committee wrote in its 2007 report.

Fast forward to 2019 … and Colorado still has no permanent trust fund.

The taxes from the state’s oil and gas fields are going annually to water projects. This also includes natural resource management efforts and local communities. They are those who are experiencing the impact by oil and gas activity. Nothing is saved in the way North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico. Those that are non-energy-producing states are salting away money for the future.

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Source: DenverPost.com

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