Natural gas and oil taxes around the world - outline

Oil and gas extraction can be taxed in various ways. There are countries in which the profits of a company are taxed resulting from its activities. There are also systems in which the country collects fees determined by the amount of extracted resources or by the sales value. The following article describes some of the tax systems in different countries: Norway, Denmark, Netherlands, Russia and the USA. Russia and the USA are the leading world producers of energy resources. In recent years the United States has made significant steps towards expanding resource extraction from unconventional sources, thus it is worthwhile looking more closely at the tax systems in Russia and in the USA. On the other hand, Norway is the "oil superpower" on a European scale; moreover its approach towards the topic is fairly simple. Denmark and Netherlands are countries which Poland is basing its solutions on, creating a legal framework for carbon oxide exploration and that is why these countries are mentioned in this study. Of course this is only an outline of this topic. The aim of this study is not to present a comprehensive compilation on taxing carbon oxide extraction around the world but to present various ways of solving this issue and making the reader aware of the problem. 

Countries have the possibility of freely shaping their tax policies, with introducing different incentives such as tax exemptions and preferential tax. These are specific circumstance involving specific geographical areas (i.e. fields whose exploitation requires significant funds) or single projects. Therefore, they will not be extensively covered. The purpose of this study is to present general principles and leitmotivs which cover tax systems in different countries.