Solyndra's Second Chapter

The details of the reorganization plan approved Monday by the judge hearing the Solyndra bankruptcy case reminded me of the admonition of one of my mentors always to beware of unintended consequences.  I'm sure the Department of Energy officials who recommended the federal loan guarantee for Solyndra in March of 2009 envisioned that the solar start-up would succeed.  As a worst-case outcome, they probably anticipated the loss of the entire $535 million direct federal loan ultimately provided by the Treasury. However, in a remarkable turn of events, the actual extent of the downside for taxpayers has now expanded to nearly $900 million, due to a quirk in the tax code and a subsequent DOE decision in 2011.

This odd sequence of events starts in early 2011 when two venture investors agreed to infuse another $75 million into the already failing Solyndra.  In order to facilitate this injection--presumably in hopes of protecting the government's substantial investment in the firm--the DOE agreed to allow the investors' loan to take precedence over the government's if Solyndra went bankrupt. Perhaps they thought that even in that case, they'd still recover most of the government's investment, because Solyndra had a sexy technology and a big new factory in Fremont, CA that could be sold to a competitor for close to full value.  They apparently didn't appreciate that Solyndra's high-cost technology had already been bypassed by falling polysilicon prices, and that the factory and its custom equipment wouldn't be of much interest to other solar producers, who were in the process of creating a huge global overhang of solar manufacturing capacity.  The Solyndra plant will now apparently be sold to a hard-drive maker for just $90 million.

In the meantime, Solyndra was piling up substantial losses running its plant and selling solar modules below cost, in order to compete with conventional solar panels that had become much cheaper. By the time Solyndra entered Chapter 11 bankruptcy, its cumulative losses apparently totaled $975 million.  To put that in perspective, the combined after tax profits of First Solar, the largest US solar producer, for the three years in which the DOE's loan to Solyndra was outstanding, were $1,265 million.

What makes Solyndra's losses relevant is that, contrary to intuition, they didn't disappear in bankruptcy.  Instead, via the investors' plan for emerging from bankruptcy, they became an asset.  And because the DOE ceded the first place in line to private investors, it is those investors who will control those "net operating losses" retained by Solyndra's reorganized parent company, 360 Degree Solar Holdings, Inc. That company apparently kept none of Solyndra's hardware, but when it acquires other companies--in any line of business--it will be able to offset future federal tax liabilities estimated by Bloomberg at $341 million.  Meanwhile, the federal government is likely to recover just 5 cents on the dollar on its "secured loan."  The Solyndra loan is a gift that keeps on giving. 

Hindsight is 20/20, but it seems pretty clear that the folks at DOE were outsmarted by private investors who had a much clearer picture of the stakes for which they were negotiating.  As we were reminded last week, Solyndra wasn't the only investment they made that went bad.  Let's hope that the others don't include similarly unpleasant surprises.  Meanwhile, I wish the IRS and Alameda County the best of luck in appealing the bankruptcy judge's ruling.

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The Unlevel Playing Field for Energy

An editorial in last weekend's Wall St. Journal led me to a recent analysis by the US Energy Information Agency (EIA) summarizing the costs of the federal government's various "subsidies" for energy from different sources.  This is both useful and timely, since discussions of specific subsidies such as the expiring wind production tax credit inevitably lead to questions about how incentives for renewable energy compare to those for oil, gas, nuclear, and other more traditional sources.  As the Journal noted, the EIA stopped short of comparing these incentives on the basis of the relative productivity of different energy sources, but even without that it's still apparent that the category of new renewable electricity--excluding hydropower--received 21% of the federal energy benefits for 2010, while accounting for less than 3% of domestic energy production that year, when oil and gas, which provided 49% of US energy production, received less than 8% of these benefits.  Whether on an absolute or relative basis, renewables receive much more generous federal support than oil and gas.

Before digging further into the EIA's analysis, I should point out an important distinction between the federal expenses and incentives covered in the report and the externalities that are frequently conflated with them.  It is certainly true that many of these energy technologies involve significant impacts that aren't reflected in their market prices, and that the production and especially the consumption of fossil fuels create serious environmental and security externalities. However, to whatever extent federal subsidies address externalities they do so indirectly, at best, and in many cases inefficiently.  The focus of this posting, just like the EIA report's, is on the federal government's cash outlays and "tax expenditures"--deductions, credits, etc.--that have a direct bearing on the federal deficit and debt burden that are the subject of intense debate in this election cycle.

The tables in the report's executive summary reveal several key facts.  Between 2007 and 2010 federal energy subsidies in constant dollars more than doubled to $37.2 B, with most of the increase going to renewables and energy efficiency, except for a sizable bump in low-income energy assistance payments.   $14.8 B of the increase originated with the 2009 stimulus bill, none of which was directed at oil and gas, but which appropriated nearly $8 B to conservation and efficiency.  Overall, renewables received $14.7 B, split 55/45 between electricity and biofuels, while nuclear received $2.5 B and oil and gas $2.8 B.  The latter figure is lower than you'll see elsewhere, because among other incentives that the EIA chose to exclude from its analysis was the Section 199 deduction for manufacturers, which is budgeted at around $1 B/yr for oil and gas firms.  The logic behind that exclusion seems sound, because US manufacturers of biofuels, wind turbines, solar panels and other renewable energy equipment qualify for the same tax credit, and at a higher rate than oil companies.

I was also struck by the fact that oil and gas received just $70 million out of the more than $4 B spent on R&D. If there's one category in which federal expenditures on renewables should be expected to dwarf those for conventional energy, this is it, and they did so by a factor of more than 20 times.  (Coal R&D received more than $0.6 B, presumably for clean coal technologies.)

It's also the case that while the growth of renewable energy output from 2000-10 was dramatic, the relatively smaller net changes in oil and gas output in that period masked the substantial replacement of depleting resources that would have otherwise resulted in a large drop in output, especially for natural gas.  This is precisely the aspect of the mature oil and gas industry at which these federal incentives are aimed, to enable US projects to compete with the international opportunities to which many of these companies have access.

The authors of the report suggested caution in comparing the allocations of incentives to the energy produced by each technology, because some of these incentives were paid for projects still under construction and in some cases represented the front-loading of what would otherwise have been a 10-year stream of tax credits.  Fair enough.  Yet even with the conservative assumption that the entire $4.9 B of non-R&D subsidies for wind power in 2010 came in the form of cash grants in lieu of the 30% investment tax credit for new wind turbines that would produce for 20 years at a 30% capacity factor, that still equates to a subsidy of more than 16% of the average present wholesale value of all the electricity those turbines will produce, using prevailing industrial sector electricity prices as a proxy for wholesale prices.  By comparison, the $2.7 B of oil and gas tax incentives for 2010 represented just 1% of the wholesale value of US production of these fuels, before refining.

A serious debate about the appropriate level of US energy subsidies should begin with the facts, rather than with misperceptions. It should also focus first on the goals of such incentives, before jumping to the details of this tax credit vs. that one.  What do we want these measures to achieve?  If it's simply the promotion of energy production, then the current incentive system looks too heavily skewed in favor of renewables.  If it's jobs, then we should be realistic about how many can be added by such a capital-intensive sector.  If it's the promotion of both energy security and innovation, then at least parts of the current system look directionally right, though I'd argue that we'd benefit from spending more on renewable energy R&D and less on the deployment of mature-but-expensive technologies like wind.  However, if emissions and climate change are our primary concerns, then these incentives are not a terribly effective way to address them.  My own expectation is that regardless of whether the wind tax credit is extended for another year, most of the tax incentives that the EIA assessed here will eventually be swept away by tax reform focused on reducing corporate tax rates to improve US competitiveness, while eliminating loopholes to make the changes revenue-neutral.

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The 2013 US Energy Agenda

It's tempting to focus mainly on the energy issues that have come up in the context of the presidential campaign, such as the Keystone XL pipeline, tax breaks for energy companies, and whether and how to regulate hydraulic fracturing, a.k.a "fracking".  Yet whoever is inaugurated next January, and however he resolves these issues, he will also face a much wider array of energy concerns, including some that are outgrowths of current policies or have emerged after a long gestation.  Though not intended as an exhaustive list, here are a few such issues that merit close attention from the next president's energy team.

They should begin by taking a fresh and objective look at the overall US energy posture and devising a clear and concise way to describe it to the public.  Big changes have taken place, with many of the issues that preoccupied us for the last decade or longer having become less relevant or out of date.  Topping that list is the sense of energy scarcity that has burdened us since the oil crises of the 1970s and early 1980s.  There's a realistic possibility that the combination of "tight oil" and the gas liquids production from shale gas could push domestic US petroleum/liquids production back above its early '70s peak of around 11 million barrels per day. At the same time, our net oil imports are declining, due in large part to the weak economy.  However, as the share of fuel efficient vehicles in our car fleet increases, it's reasonable to think that we've already seen the peak of US demand for petroleum fuels, even after the economy returns to healthy growth.  The net result might fall short of energy independence, but it will put us in a much better position than our largest economic rivals in terms of real energy security. 

Then there's shale gas.  Not only has it reversed a worrisome decline in US natural gas production that prompted numerous projects to import liquefied natural gas (LNG), but it has upended our assumptions about future prices and emissions in the electric power sector, while completing the divorce of oil and electricity that began in the 1980s.  Now we're talking seriously about exporting natural gas. When you combine all these changes with biofuels that are contributing roughly a million barrels per day to US supply (in volumetric, though not BTU-equivalent terms) the need to revisit some of our most basic assumptions about energy looks compelling. 

Energy scarcity isn't the only paradigm that needs to be rethought.  The current administration apparently took office with a view that was prevalent in the environmental community and among some in energy circles, that the solutions to climate change and energy security were effectively synonymous and synergistic.  That view predates the shale/tight oil revolution and was founded on the notion that renewable energy and efficiency were the only serious answers to both concerns.  That linkage was always oversimplified, because it ignored the trade-offs inherent in the shortcomings of every energy technology available.  And now, thanks to unexpected technological developments, we face an explicit choice between energy abundance based on hydrocarbons and a lower-emissions future based on renewables and electric vehicles that won't reach the required scale for decades, despite promising early signs. The transition from the former to the latter appears long and largely unpredictable, nor will it be cheap. 

The next administration also faces a set of practical issues, along with the big-picture reframing described above. Two of these issues involve urgent tasks.  The first is the growing need for a thorough evaluation of the recent and current approach to incentivizing renewable energy technologies and projects.  Since early 2009 we've spent tens of billions of dollars on a constellation of federal grants, tax credits, and loan guarantees to stimulate the growth of a domestic renewable and advanced energy industry and the deployment of its products. There's a lot of new hardware on the ground, but the sustainability of this industry looks uncertain. Although only a fraction of the companies that received federal support have failed, the tally has grown large enough--with the addition of Abound Solar last week--that it's no longer acceptable merely to shrug off these losses as par for the course.  We need some hard-nosed, detail-oriented outsiders to conduct a comprehensive post-expenditure review and extract the major lessons learned.  That should be an absolute prerequisite before anyone contemplates renewing or expanding any of these programs, including the Pentagon's $210 million "green fleet" program.

Another urgent clean-up task is the reform of the federal Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS).  This 2007 mandate was premised on the imminent arrival of cellulosic biofuel technologies that have turned out to be much harder than expected to transfer from demonstration to commercial scale.  That has resulted in drastic annual revisions to the cellulosic biofuel targets of the mandate, but even these lower targets have not been achieved.  Instead, the EPA imposes penalties on refiners and gasoline blenders for failing to blend non-existent volumes, with consumers ultimately absorbing the higher costs at the pump.  The attractive vision of abundant renewable fuels has thus turned into a bureaucratic game.  And while corn ethanol supplies 10% of gasoline and consumes nearly 40% of the US corn crop, it cannot more than double to meet the entire 36 billion gallon per year RFS target for 2022, nor should we wish it to.  Instead, the RFS must be updated to reflect reality, and the associated biofuel-credit trading system should be restructured to squeeze out the fraud that is infecting it, instead of leaving refiners and blenders--and again ultimately consumers--to pick up a tab estimated at $200 million. 

These items don't constitute an entire energy agenda by themselves, but together with a few higher-profile proposals from among those that both campaigns will announce and debate during the next four months, they could fill out a worthy first-hundred-days' energy plan for 2013.

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Administration's Tax Proposals Would Hamper US Energy Output

The Obama administration is proposing significant changes in US corporate taxes, as reported in today's Wall St. Journal. If enacted, the corporate tax rate would fall from 35% of income to 28%, although the elimination of numerous tax incentives would subject many companies, including most in the energy sector, to higher taxes overall. On the surface, this looks like the kind of tax reform that has been long overdue; however, as always with such efforts, the details matter enormously. In this case, the details would create an even less-level playing field for US energy producers, while doubling down on the expensive tax benefits currently provided to favored sectors and technologies. It's ironic that this is being proposed just when rising gasoline prices have put the administration on the defensive concerning its energy policies. It will do the President little good to point to increasing US oil production--demonstrably the result of energy prices and policies in previous administrations--if he simultaneously jeopardizes that recovery in output by making it less attractive to produce oil and gas here.

The basic principle of cutting marginal corporate tax rates in exchange for the elimination of "tax expenditures", or loopholes, in common parlance, is consistent with the much broader tax reform proposed by the fiscal commission established by the White House in 2010, even if the administration has opted for the upper end of the range of tax rates suggested by Simpson-Bowles. In general, US oil and gas companies wouldn't be worse off for losing the various deductions and tax credits in the current tax code, if the marginal tax rate were reduced sufficiently and if the administration weren't proposing to raise royalty rates on US onshore production by 50% at the same time. However, the combination of the proposed changes, including subjecting part of their non-US income to US taxation, would not only make US oil and gas projects less attractive, relative to projects in other countries; they would also make it less attractive to be a US oil and gas company, instead of a non-US company that operates here. For an administration that is concerned about US competitiveness, this is perverse logic, indeed.

It doesn't take a crystal ball to predict that the combination of higher corporate taxes on energy companies, higher royalties, and the more complex permitting processes instituted by the administration even before the Deepwater Horizon accident will make it much harder to sustain the recent recovery in US oil output beyond the completion of projects that were initiated during the previous administration. New oil and gas production would probably still be profitable here after these changes, particularly if oil prices remain as high as they are now, but company portfolios would begin to shift back towards non-US projects that look more rewarding by comparison, and US companies would lose some of their edge to non-US competitors. None of that would be good for US energy consumers, considering that the oil and gas industry accounts for 62% of the energy we use, including 49% of all energy produced domestically.

Of course, the administration's tax proposals reach well beyond oil and gas. Among other things, they would extend the Production Tax Credit for wind energy by another year, through 2013, as well as extending for another year the Treasury renewable energy cash grants that expired at the end of last year. After 2012, the cash grants would be replaced by refundable tax credits, which essentially means you'd get a check from the IRS, rather than from the Treasury, if the credit were larger than the taxes your firm owes. The net effect of the latter would perpetuate a costly system of renewable energy subsidies that reward the deployment of renewable energy hardware, rather than the actual generation of renewable energy. (That distinction is important whenever the hardware is installed somewhere lacking in good wind, sun, or other renewable resources.)

Then there's the proposal to boost the electric vehicle tax credit to a maximum of $10,000 per car, and to shift the recipient from the purchaser to the seller. That circumvents the problem that under the current $7,500 credit you'd have to earn enough income to be paying at least that much in federal income taxes, in order to enjoy the full benefit of the credit. However, it also makes it much likelier that manufacturers and dealers would pocket a significant slice of the higher credit, instead of consumers. Since it was nearly impossible to justify the $7,500 per car credit on the basis of actual oil or emissions savings, the higher credit looks even less justifiable, other than as a means of raising the odds of achieving the President's arbitrary target of putting a million EVs on the road by 2015--another near impossibility. The pluses I see here include an automatic phaseout based on time, rather than sales volume, and a broadening of the credit to cover other efficient vehicle technologies such as natural gas, though it's not clear whether it would also cover advanced diesels. Still, if the President has his way, we'll be spending more than $10 billion to put vehicles on the road that will save less than 35,000 barrels per day of oil, or about 0.4% of our total gasoline consumption, along with greenhouse gas emissions worth less than $1 billion at market prices--even European market prices.

The proposals include other provisions that would affect the energy sector, including tax benefits for advanced energy manufacturing such as wind turbines, solar panels, advanced batteries, electric vehicles, and an array of other equipment. I'd be much happier with those incentives if they were provided as an alternative to origin-blind deployment incentives, instead of alongside them. And although oil and gas companies would lose the manufacturing tax deduction on their US production, it appears they might get to keep that deduction on US refining, which has been hurt by higher oil prices. That would be small consolation to independent refining companies that have been forced to close several large east coast refineries or that are barely breaking even.

If President Obama is serious about tax reform, the current proposals--flawed as they are--would have carried a lot more weight had they been introduced a year ago, in the immediate aftermath of the Simpson-Bowles report and various other tax reform suggestions, rather than in an election year. And if he is truly serious about the"all-out, all-of-the-above strategy" for energy that he referenced in this year's State of the Union address, the current proposals look like an extremely odd way to execute that, favoring as heavily as they do sources that account for less than 2% of US energy production, while penalizing those that contribute nearly half. The good news is that this is a meal that won't be eaten hot. For now, this package serves as another plank in the reelection campaign platform. Whether it will ultimately be implemented depends not just on who occupies the White House after January 20, 2013, but also on the composition of the next Congress since it has no chance of passage in the 112th.

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Key Renewable Energy Subsidies About to Expire

The US renewable energy industry faces a greatly altered incentive environment next year, as eligibility for two of its largest current subsidies comes to an end at the close of 2011. The corn ethanol sector will likely see the complete withdrawal of the blenders' credit that has fueled its growth for more than 30 years, while new projects generating electricity from renewable energy sources must shortly attract investment without the Treasury grants that provided up-front cash in place of federal investment tax credits against taxable income--a commodity sometimes in even shorter supply among recipients than the energy they seek to generate. With these expirations taking place against the backdrop of a US presidential election campaign and record levels of deficit and federal debt, the prospects for another round of one-year subsidy extensions look slim. Yet renewable energy development in the US won't grind to a halt without them, because these two programs represent merely the most generous layer of the complex web supporting renewables.

Consider the venerable ethanol tax credit, which was made mostly redundant by the passage of the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007, with its Renewable Fuels Standard mandating the use of increasing quantities of ethanol in gasoline. In fact, ethanol producers were never more than indirect beneficiaries of the $0.45 per gallon credit, which was paid to refiners and other gasoline blenders in order to help create a market for ethanol. Mission accomplished. Moreover, with US gasoline sales having stalled at a level that can barely absorb all the ethanol that existing US ethanol plants can produce, unless gasoline blends containing more than 10% ethanol become popular, there is simply no need for corn ethanol output to expand further. In fact, the market will be more than sufficiently challenged providing outlets for the limited quantities of cellulosic and other advanced ethanol likely to be produced in the next few years. As I've noted previously, forward-looking members of the industry are now seeking help in expanding the market for high-ethanol blends, rather than perpetuating an outdated support for existing sales.

The situation for renewable electricity sources like wind, solar and geothermal energy is more complicated. The expiring Treasury grants were introduced as part of the 2009 stimulus to stand in for the "tax equity swap" market, a category of financial transactions that froze up during the financial crisis. These swaps provided a private-sector cash-flow bridge between project expenditures and tax credits that only paid off after start-up as income was earned or energy produced. That was particularly helpful for smaller, less profitable developers, but it also provided an additional check on marginal projects. Even after credit markets eased, most developers understandably preferred the cash grants, which reduced their financing costs and avoided the fees that bankers charged on tax equity deals. However, that preference doesn't justify continuing the cash grant program--particularly for the large, profitable corporations that increasing dominate this space. The industry should focus more effort on fostering the revival of a liquid and competitive tax equity market and less on lobbying for an extension of a temporary stimulus measure.

Either way, the tax credits behind these grants and swaps won't last forever. Under current law, the principal federal tax credit for wind will be in place only through 2012, for biomass and geothermal through 2013, and for solar through 2016. Instead of a scenario of perpetual last-minute extensions such as we've seen in the past, the industry and its investors should be thinking about a scenario in which all these tax credits end, either as part of comprehensive tax reform that eliminates most such "tax expenditures"--including the ones for the oil and gas industry that have become so contentious in the last few years--or a transition to providing renewables with similar sorts of incentives as oil and gas, which essentially amount to forms of accelerated depreciation and modest tax breaks for manufacturing in the US, rather than in other countries.

It's also important to realize that even without these tax credits and in the absence of comprehensive federal energy legislation that looks unlikely any time soon, the industry would still retain numerous state-level benefits, starting with the renewable portfolio standards (RPS) for electricity currently in place in 29 states and the District of Columbia, a tally that encompasses most of the states with the best wind and solar resources. These RPS's are similar to the Renewable Fuel Standard for biofuels in requiring utilities to include increasing proportions of renewable energy in their supply portfolios, whether owned or purchased. Such standards, including California's aggressive RPS targeting 33% renewable electricity by 2020, stand outside the polarizing political debate over taxation and government expenditures. They function as an implicit tax on ratepayers, rather than taxpayers, because they show up within customers' utility bills rather than on their 1040 forms. That distinction could be particularly important if the congressional supercommittee fails to reach a consensus, and the default spending cuts built into the Budget Control Act that resolved this summer's debt ceiling crisis kick in.

So while it might appear that the US renewable energy industry is about it be cut loose from the key incentives that enabled it to grow to its present dimensions, it will continue to benefit from supports not enjoyed by other industrial sectors. Even when the current tax credits expire, renewables will have a mandated market providing a floor beneath them. Ethanol output won't revert to 2005 levels, nor will renewables vanish from the landscape, even if their growth slows a bit while the rest of the economy struggles to emerge from the aftermath of the Great Recession and financial crisis, and to avoid a double-dip. Meanwhile, global overcapacity in wind turbine and solar module manufacturing will keep their prices trending lower--and installations stronger--pending industry consolidations that will position both for healthier, more sustainable growth in the long run. All of this falls well short of the level of help for the industry that most renewable energy supporters would like to see, but it's far more than the level playing field (ignoring externalities) that would see cheap and abundant natural gas sweep away all competition for new power generation.

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US Renewables Need A Fallback Plan

When I described some of the energy implications of the debt limit crisis last month, the most serious ones were associated with a default by the US government in the event the debt ceiling wasn't extended. That risk has been resolved, for now. But that doesn't mean that everything looks rosy, especially for renewables. Renewable energy technologies and projects are far more dependent on government assistance and policies than conventional energy. The fate of a wide range of federal energy incentives looks highly uncertain, and the impact of that uncertainty is matched by doubts about the health of the US economy and its growth prospects. With the pace of growth already slowing in some renewable energy sectors, any manufacturers or project developers that aren't thinking seriously about how they would manage without federal incentives could be setting themselves up to become roadkill.

Understanding why requires taking a closer look at the debt ceiling bill that Congress passed in the context of the federal budget baseline--never mind that the US Congress has not enacted a budget in more than two years. In April the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) published its assessment of what the economy would look like under the budget submitted by President Obama in February, as well as under the laws already on the books. The latter comprises the "March CBO Baseline" that was mentioned frequently during the debt limit talks and that formed the basis for comparing different proposals. (See Table 1-5 of the CBO report.) Without factoring in this week's debt limit agreement, the CBO projected a cumulative deficit for fiscal years 2012-21 of $6.7 trillion. That figure is important for several reasons.

First, it serves as a reminder that even after the $917 billion of cuts agreed up front and the $1.2-1.5 trillion of future cuts to be determined later this year, the US debt would still grow by more than $4 trillion over the next decade, mainly through increases in mandatory, or non-discretionary spending--entitlements and other untouchables. That won't change even under the deal done by the Senate and House this week; all of its pre-programmed cuts are to discretionary spending, the category into which most federal spending on renewable energy would fall.

But even that $4 trillion figure looks optimistic. As I understand it the CBO baseline assumes that next January 1 all of the Bush-era tax cuts will expire on schedule, resulting in substantial increases in taxes on both ordinary income and dividend income. And that's not just for those earning more than $200,000 per year, or whatever the threshold of "wealthy" is determined to be; it's for everyone. Nor would the Alternative Minimum Tax, which has been biting a growing number of middle class families every year, be indexed as proposed. It also assumes that the Social Security payroll tax will revert to its normal level of 6.2%, up from this year's 4.2%. Barring a dramatic improvement in the economy between now and the end of the year, it seems unlikely that all of those tax increases will be allowed to take effect. That means that the government's revenue through 2021 is likely to be significantly lower than the CBO forecast, because both growth and tax rates are likely to be lower. That translates into bigger deficits and more pressure for deficit reduction.

So the environment for continued support for renewables will be one in which the government's projected deficits continue as far as the eye can see, even after painful cuts, while its ability to continue borrowing on that scale looks suspect. With the main focus of budget cuts falling on the category that includes cash support for renewables, how likely is it that the Congress would extend the Treasury renewable energy cash grant program when it expires on December 31, 2011, or add new appropriations for the Department of Energy's Loan Guarantee Program? And if the Congressional super-committee's proposals include tax reform that would eliminate many "tax expenditures"--tax credits and deductions--then a host of programs such as the solar investment tax credit, the wind, biomass and geothermal energy production tax credit, various biofuel tax credits, and the electric vehicle purchase tax credit, could end up on the cutting block. In the coming scramble to avoid the budget knife, renewables will be competing with better-established programs with broader and more influential constituencies.

It has always been a risky proposition to build companies and industries, the economics of which depended on substantial government subsidies. Some folks could be on the verge of finding out just how risky. If we go down that path, it will probably also result in awkward questions being asked about some of the decisions made by the stewards of these government programs. They should be; I've never understood what kind of due diligence could have resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars in grants or "loans" going to to clean energy and automotive startups with minimal track records, when private investors weren't willing to bet on those risks at that scale. From a national energy policy and strategy perspective, our focus should not be on saving individual companies--no TARP for renewables, I suspect--but on preserving key capabilities essential to ensuring a long-term competitive US position in the global clean energy market.

What would that entail? First, as government funding for renewables becomes constrained it should be focused on R&D at the expense of deployment. Not only would the available money go much farther, but it would also create more options for the future. The next step should be to ensure that whatever the government does spend on deployment should go to projects that are close to being viable without help, or in the case of the military that enhance combat capabilities. That means, for example, focusing solar development assistance on sunny places like the southwest--preferably in proximity to existing transmission infrastructure--and putting an end to paying people to install utility and rooftop solar in places that receive less than about 5 "peak sun hours" (kWh/m2) per day, on average. Again, the money would go farther, and we'd be shoring up nearly viable operations, instead of trying to command the tide not to overwhelm the marginal ones. And finally, as I suggested last week, a greater emphasis on exports to developing country markets, where energy demand is growing at impressive rates and where renewables are becoming increasingly popular, would increase export earnings and employment while participating in volume-related unit cost reductions. And looking beyond renewable energy, the US government has a bird's nest on the ground in the form of the potential lease bid and royalty income from the substantial oil and gas resources that have been placed off limits for various reasons. Tapping those looks like a much smarter source of revenue--not to mention job creation--than selling off the Strategic Petroleum Reserve bit by bit.

If that sounds like a recipe for putting the US cleantech industry on life support after years of robust government-supported growth, then that's consistent with the severity of the fallback plan that could become necessary. The need for this would depend on the priorities set by the special Congressional deficit reduction committee established by the debt ceiling bill, and by the Congress as a whole, along with the subsequent efforts that will be necessary to prevent our long-term debt from growing beyond our ability to service it. Nor would it be quite the starvation diet it might appear, as long as states kept their renewable portfolio standards in place. This isn't a scenario the cleantech industry would willingly choose, but it's one that it can't ignore.

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Energy Implications of a Federal Default

Much of the attention concerning a possible failure to increase the US debt ceiling by month-end has focused on the government's ability to borrow, and on how individuals might be affected, whether as recipients of social security, pay or pensions from various branches of the federal government, or as consumers seeking car loans or mortgages. I haven't seen a lot of discussion about the potential impact on energy, other than some speculation about higher oil prices. As I started to consider how different categories of energy might be affected, it occurred to me that a list, or a set of lists was the best way to tackle this. It's not intended to be comprehensive, and I would welcome your input on what I've overlooked.

The first category of energy impacts concerns companies or individuals who are awaiting a check or wire transfer from the government, for which funds might not be available in the absence of a prompt deal to extend the debt ceiling. These include:

• Projects that have qualified for Treasury renewable energy cash grants, but have not yet received the funds, or that hope to qualify shortly. Since this program started in 2009, the Treasury has disbursed $7.8 billion to project owners and developers.
  
• Companies that sell energy to the federal government and its various branches. This includes start-ups selling renewable aviation and diesel fuels to the Department of Defense, as well as firms selling the government the large quantities of electricity and conventional fuels it uses. (I will be attending a joint Army/Air Force energy forum tomorrow.
  
• Companies with contracts related to various energy efficiency programs initiated under the stimulus or previous legislation, including weatherization.
  
• Individuals who receive federal energy assistance.

The next category includes companies that aren't expecting cash, but are relying on loan guarantees from the federal government to help them secure more attractive financing--or in the case of some risky projects and technologies, any financing at all--either from commercial lenders or directly from the Federal Financing Bank.

• Beneficiaries of the Department of Energy's loan guarantee program that have not yet secured loans are a good example of this category. Note than many of the projects listed on the Loan Program Office's site have only obtained conditional approvals, indicating that their financing has not yet closed. They would be vulnerable either to a protracted default or one that undermined confidence in the government's "full faith and credit" to such an extent that a federal loan guarantee wouldn't aid in lining up lenders.

The next category covers the large number of entities that benefit from energy-related tax credits and deductions. Although they aren't directly vulnerable to a default, they are exposed to the risk that their particular tax benefits might be canceled or reduced as part of an agreement between the Congress and White House to extend the debt limit.

• Refiners and others blending ethanol into gasoline and collecting the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit.
  
• Producers of biodiesel and cellulosic biofuels and small ethanol producers, all of which receive tax credits for producing renewable fuels.
  
• Oil and gas companies benefiting from the various tax credits and deductions that have been in the administration's cross-hairs since it took office.
  
• US manufacturers, including oil and gas companies, power generators, ethanol producers, and a wide array of non-energy recipients of the Sec. 199 deduction for manufacturing their products in the US.
  
• Purchasers of electric vehicles eligible for the tax credit of up to $7,500 per car for EVs and qualifying plug-in hybrids, or up to $4,000 for natural gas vehicles and other alternative fuels.
  
• Car manufacturers and dealers depending on these tax credits to help sell their vehicles.

Then there's the effect on the vast majority of us who aren't in line for an energy-related grant, loan guarantee, or tax credit, but could see the ripple effects of all of these concerns in our energy bills, along with the more basic question of how a default might affect the price of oil and other mainstream energy sources. That subject deserves a posting of its own, but my quick take on this is that while a default could certainly drive up oil prices by means of a weaker dollar, that could be offset by the reduced oil demand that would follow the slowing of the US and global economies in the aftermath of a default. Up, then down, perhaps? I will join you in hoping we don't have to find out the hard way.

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Ethanol's Future Without Subsidies

Given the remarkable longevity of the tax credit for ethanol blended into gasoline, it seems fitting that it would take a problem on the scale of the massive US deficit and $14 trillion federal debt to trigger its demise. Yet despite a widely-publicized Senate vote in June and the announcement of a key compromise among three Senators last week--two from the corn belt and one from the West Coast--it remains unclear just when and how the cancellation of this subsidy will become law. And because the fate of the subsidy is linked to that of the parallel tariff and duty on imported ethanol, the US ethanol industry faces not just the prospect of a more challenging market by year-end, but one that could include competition from foreign suppliers with special advantages under US renewable fuels regulations. Some producers may end up wishing they hadn't expanded output quite so fast.

I've followed the ethanol subsidy for much longer than I've been blogging about it. As I was reading a two-part assessment of the changing ethanol situation in Biofuels Digest it occurred to me to take the dusty report from my long-ago M.B.A. project off the shelf. Its topic was the market for "gasohol", gasoline blended with up to 10% ethanol, on the West Coast in the early 1980s. At the time, blenders received roughly the same tax credit as today's $0.45 per gallon of ethanol blended, thanks to the 1978 Federal Energy Tax Act and the Highway Tax Act of 1983. That benefit was a lot more generous in then-current dollars than now, but much smaller in aggregate. In the intervening decades, gasoline with ethanol has expanded from around 2% of the market to nearly 100%. In much of the country it is now harder to find gasoline without ethanol than it was to find gasohol back then.

That's only one indication of the tremendous success this industry has enjoyed, due almost entirely to government policies like the Volumetric Ethanol Excise Tax Credit and the national Renewable Fuels Standard (RFS) established in 2005. In fact the eventual demise of the ethanol tax credit was virtually guaranteed by the passage of an even more ambitious RFS as part of the federal Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. Under the RFS, blending ethanol into gasoline in steadily increasing proportions became mandatory, rendering the tax credit paid to refiners and other gasoline blenders redundant. Just as importantly, it expanded the scale of ethanol blending to such an extent that the total annual cost of the so-called blenders credit grew from roughly $1.8 billion in 2005 to a projected $6 billion this year--too big to ignore.

The deal agreed by Senators Feinstein (D-CA), Klobuchar (D-MN) and Thune (R-SD) last week would reportedly result in the early termination of both the ethanol tax credit, which was due to expire at the end of 2011 but could have been renewed, and the corresponding ethanol import tariff. It would devote $1.33 billion of the unspent funds to deficit reduction, while diverting another $668 million to extend tax credits for alternative fuel refueling (or recharging) infrastructure and cellulosic biofuel tax credits. This outcome appears to have pleased at least part of the ethanol industry. However, in order for it to become law, it must still be voted on by both houses of Congress, either by itself or as a provision within another bill, perhaps even the debt ceiling extension package that could emerge from the ongoing deliberations between the House, Senate and White House.

The ultimate effect of these changes on the ethanol industry remains somewhat uncertain, though it is hard to see them as a net positive, other than the longer-term benefit of supporting infrastructure investments that could be crucial in resolving a key bottleneck in ethanol distribution. Without much higher sales of gasoline blends containing more than 10% ethanol, the market is already nearly saturated with ethanol, and that's before factoring in the additional imports that the elimination of the tariff is likely to promote. And at least in the case of ethanol derived from sugar cane, those imports will enjoy an important advantage over ethanol derived from corn: most of them are likely to qualify for the stricter designation of "Advanced Biofuel" under the RFS, a category for which the annual quota is just starting to take off, and that cannot be satisfied by corn ethanol but also seems unlikely to be filled by domestic cellulosic ethanol any time soon.

Biofuels Digest suggested that long-dated ethanol futures have already nose-dived in anticipation of the end of the tax credit. It's true that ethanol for delivery in January 2012 is trading for around $0.35/gal. less than the August 2011 ethanol futures contract, reflecting a widening of ethanol's discount to the gasoline futures contract over that interval of around $0.11/gal. However, it also seems highly relevant that corn futures have recently retreated from their early-June peak of nearly $8/bushel to $6.80, with December corn--from which January ethanol might be produced--down at $6.20/bu. That leaves ethanol producers a small but still positive margin on that January futures price. So it is hardly certain that the end of the tax credit will, by itself, stress US corn ethanol producers. If anything, refiners and consumers--who have arguably received most of the benefit of the credit in recent years--stand to lose the most from its disappearance.

Import competition could have much more serious consequences, as the fuel ethanol industry truly begins to globalize. Brazil is the big player internationally, even if the recent rise in sugar prices and a smaller-than-expected cane crop have created the bizarre situation of Brazil actually importing corn ethanol from the US. The historically fragmented Brazilian sugar cane industry is currently both expanding and consolidating, led by companies like Raizen, the new joint venture between Shell and Cosan, which has indicated plans to double its ethanol capacity to 5 billion liters per year (1.3 billion gallons per year.) Nor is Brazil the only tropical country that can grow cane and produce sugar, ethanol and electricity from modern facilities. The Brazilian model could be replicated elsewhere in Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Not all of that extra ethanol will come here, but enough of it could, helped by the RFS, to put an effective cap on US ethanol prices. I'm not aware of a similar constraint on corn prices.

The US ethanol industry has matured in the last three decades. Today's ethanol plants are much more efficient than the ones supplying the small quantities used for gasohol in the early 1980s, and they now consume around 40% of the US corn crop. The industry has expanded on a scale that would have seemed nearly impossible thirty years ago, though in my view it has in the process fallen into the classic overcapacity trap of commodity manufacturers. Whether that situation is temporary or permanent depends on the success of blends containing more than 10% ethanol--blends that the market has so far treated with indifference. But either way, when the training wheels finally come off with the end of the blenders credit and import tariff, we shouldn't be surprised to see more of the small and higher-cost producers fall by the wayside. That will have local consequences, but the ethanol industry will survive, just as it survived the bankruptcies of some ethanol producers during the financial crisis. Ethanol is here to stay, and it is about to embark on a new career as a more normal commodity.

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Honey, I Shrunk the Oil Industry

I finally finished watching the archived video from last week's Senate Finance Committee hearing with the heads of the five largest major oil companies in the US, including the two that are based in the EU. The few nuggets of real information and insight that were exchanged were nearly drowned out by political posturing, but my hat is off to Chairman Baucus (D-MT) for his willingness to engage in a genuine give and take with his guests. I attribute much of the frustration that was on display to the conflict between the facts and their context: Although the companies are mostly right on the principles and consequences involved in the proposal to strip them of their tax incentives, it's nearly impossible for anyone outside the industry to get past the large profits these companies are making and the out-of-control federal deficit that the Congress must endeavor to rein in. Perhaps I can offer a bit of perspective for both sides of the argument.

First, neither this Congress nor the administration is proposing windfall profits taxes--government's traditional threat when oil profits soar--nor are there serious calls for nationalization of the industry. Having watched other countries make a hash of such moves, it appears we've learned a thing or two in the last three decades. The measures currently under consideration are much less extreme than that, and I imagine they sounded reasonable and fair to a lot of Americans who are in sticker shock every time they drive by a gas station. However, that doesn't make them good policy--energy or tax.

At the same time, despite Senator Hatch's pie chart showing the relative size of the US oil industry compared to the global industry, including OPEC, few of those grilling the CEOs seemed to grasp the scale involved--a major factor in the absolute magnitude of the profits in question--including the size of companies with which these firms must compete for opportunities around the world. For comparison I couldn't turn up an estimate of Saudi Aramco's first quarter earnings through a Google search, so I had to devise one myself. Based on an average OPEC basket price of $101/bbl and a conservative production cost of $20/bbl, Aramco's average volume of oil exports in January and February, as reported in the database of the Joint Organizations Data Initiative, implies quarterly earnings of around $50 billion--more than the total of the five companies represented at the hearing--and that's assuming that every barrel Aramco refines and sells within the Kingdom is at a breakeven. When it comes to oil profits, big is relative. Even the much smaller Petrobras, 64% owned by the Brazilian government, posted $6.7 B in first quarter earnings, beating US #2 Chevron, in which I own shares.

Several of the Senators complained that the math didn't seem to work, in terms of understanding how the withdrawal of a couple of billion a year in tax incentives could have a serious impact on the five companies and shift investment away from the US, a much more serious concern than the effect on earnings. Having participated in the project portfolio process of a major oil company in the past, I believe I know what the Senators were missing.

It seems counter-intuitive, but corporate-level accounting profits reported after the fact have virtually nothing to do with project selection decisions, other than influencing how much money is available to invest. The choice of which new projects to pursue and which to leave on the shelf hinges on detailed comparisons of expected future after-tax earnings and cash flow for each project. Tax rates, deductions and credits play an important role in those calculations. For some projects the go/no-go decision rests on a knife edge of risked net present value, and in that environment a lost tax deduction (Section 199) or tax credit could make US projects look consistently less attractive than their foreign counterparts. (Ironically, these companies' renewable energy investments in the US would also suffer the same disadvantage.) Put enough US energy projects in that position, and the result is inevitable: fewer wells drilled here, less future US production as current production declines, and eventually a smaller domestic oil industry with fewer capabilities.

Despite a few half-hearted attempts to channel the ghost of William Jennings Bryan, I doubt that any of the Senators participating in the hearing really wants such an outcome. It wouldn't help the millions of Americans who are alarmed by high gas prices, and it's hardly consistent with the President's goals of reducing oil imports by one-third and improving US energy security. Unfortunately, because of the way the question has been framed, in terms of a narrow set of tax breaks the industry enjoys, there are no good answers. Those can only be found by expanding the conversation to encompass a truly constructive US energy policy promoting both conventional and renewable energy, along with meaningful deficit reduction.

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The Oil Earnings Backlash

Another oil industry earnings season bolstered by high oil prices has sparked the customary controversies about price gouging and industry subsidies. Last Thursday I participated in ExxonMobil's press call following the release of that company's first quarter earnings. In addition to the responses to my questions about access to non-US energy resources and the progress of the company's algae venture with Synthetic Genomics, I was intrigued by the answer of Ken Cohen, VP of Public and Government Affairs, to a question concerning Exxon's crude oil sales to other refiners. It resonated with my own experience in commodities trading at Texaco in the 1980s and '90s. Not only do major companies like Exxon, Chevron, Shell and BP control only a small fraction of the world's petroleum reserves and production, but they are often large net buyers of crude oil for their refining operations. Understanding the relationship between industry profits, gas prices and the federal tax deductions and credits designed to promote domestic energy production requires a deeper look into the results.

It's discouraging how much confusion still exists in the media concerning oil prices and gasoline prices, as noted in an excellent posting on the topic by Robert Rapier. Members of the public who are convinced that oil companies are manipulating prices to gouge them can always find some poorly reported news story or garbled explanation to justify their belief. Yet while it's certainly true that oil companies benefit from the higher oil prices that result when global demand for petroleum products is strong and supply is constrained and/or subject to unusual risks--both factors are at work today--their interests are not quite as divorced from those of gasoline consumers as they appear, because they are, to a very large extent, also consumers themselves.

A quick look at ExxonMobil's 1Q11 earnings release shows their net global production of crude oil and natural gas liquids at 2.4 million barrels per day (MBD). Meanwhile the company's refineries processed nearly 5.2 MBD in support of global refined product sales of nearly 6.3 MBD. In other words, Exxon had to buy more crude oil from other suppliers than it produced itself in order to feed its refineries, and then still had to acquire more than a million barrels per day of additional refined products from other refiners to meet its marketing demand. Meanwhile, 81% of its nearly $10.7 billion of first quarter earnings was attributable to oil and gas production, and 85% of that was from production outside the US. By comparison, just 6% of that $10.7 billion came from the domestic refining and marketing activities affected by US gasoline prices.

That's a fairly typical pattern for the majors, which have generally been short of crude oil for their refining systems since the big wave of nationalizations and expropriations in the 1970s. My old company, Texaco, refined about twice as much oil as it produced and sold roughly half-again more products than it refined. That meant that my trading colleagues and I were in the market every day, buying crude oil and refined products from our competitors, in order to keep our refineries and marketing outlets supplied. When supplies were tight, the only way to secure what we needed was to bid more than the next company, and that reinforced the dynamic of rising prices until supplies expanded or demand slackened. I see that as of the first quarter, Texaco's successor Chevron Corp. (of which I am a shareholder) produced about as much oil globally as it refined, though not in the US, where it processed 80% more crude than it produced domestically. Global product sales exceeded refinery throughput by more than a million barrels per day. Royal Dutch Shell's results exhibit an even more pronounced case of net purchases of both crude oil and refined products.

So while higher oil prices are good for some parts of these companies' businesses--the exploration and production divisions that contribute the majority of profitability in most years--other business segments find higher prices a mixed blessing, at best. That's particularly true for the parts of these companies with which US consumers have the most contact.

As for the questions I posed to Mr. Cohen, I was somewhat surprised to hear that ExxonMobil isn't looking for the US government to provide it with any assistance in gaining access to resources around the world. Foreign governments routinely help their national and quasi-national oil companies to negotiate for access. ExxonMobil seems able to compete in this arena without help from the US government but is much more concerned about the latter's restrictions on access here at home, and its efforts to tax non-US income that has already been taxed by host governments overseas. And with regard to ExxonMobil's activities in algae, I was informed that R&D is progressing well in both California and in Baytown, TX, where a large pond has just been completed. Mr. Cohen stressed that it was still early days for algae.

The purpose of drawing my readers' attention to the distinction concerning oil companies' large net oil and product purchases isn't to solicit sympathy for an industry that's obviously having a very profitable run, but to remind you that the oil and gasoline price situation is a lot more complicated than suggested by the sound bites we often hear. The biggest companies make most of their profits producing oil and gas outside the US, while refining and marketing here remains a capital-intensive and relatively low-return sideline that many of them have been quietly exiting for years. Ending the industry's tax breaks outside of the comprehensive tax system reform I believe to be necessary probably wouldn't harm the big oil companies as much as it would accelerate their shift away from operations in the US that contribute less to company profits than they do to US energy security.

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Could Competition and Low Demand Stall Wind Power's Growth?

In the last week I've seen reports that two of the biggest wind power developers in the world, Spain's Iberdrola Renovables and Portugal's EDP Renovaveis, plan to reduce their wind power investments in the US for at least the next couple of years. That's significant because these two firms together accounted for just under a third of the 5,115 MW of new wind turbines installed in the US last year. This isn't for lack of opportunities or incentives, but for some very old-fashioned reasons: low demand and competition from other energy sources. It's an important reminder that renewable energy can't just be viewed as a set of technologies; they are also businesses, and as such are subject to the normal ups and downs of the market. It also highlights the limitations of government incentives.

Wind power had been on a tear in the US as recently as 2009, when a record 10,010 MW of turbines were installed, extending an enviable 5-year run of 40% average annual growth in wind capacity. Last year that growth slowed to 15% as new installations fell by half. That occurred in spite of the federal stimulus program that converted tax credits for renewable energy projects into up-front cash grants, paying $ 3.5 billion to wind developers out of a total of $4.2 billion expended in 2010. Although eligibility for that benefit was due to expire on 12/31/10, it was subsequently extended through 2011 under December's "lame duck" tax legislation, largely on the strength of arguments that it would keep wind and other renewables growing at a brisk pace. What happened?

At least two major factors related to the business environment are weighing on wind development, as well as another factor unique to renewables. First, electricity demand that was depressed by the recession is apparently still at least 1% below pre-crisis levels. That doesn't sound like much, but the difference is roughly equivalent to the entire amount of electricity generated from wind power in 2008. As a result, utilities have become less keen to sign long-term offtake agreements, or "power purchase agreements" (PPAs), with new wind farms. Both EDP and Iberdrola cited this problem in reference to their 2011 plans.

Wind power also faces strong competition from cheap natural gas, as you've probably heard many times by now. Despite some resistance to shale drilling in states like New York, there's every indication that US gas output will continue to expand. Last year the US produced more natural gas than in any year since 1973, and the end of this boom is not in sight. Although advocates may claim that wind is now cost-competitive with gas, that remains a best-case analysis for locations with excellent wind resources and good access to transmission. Natural gas at $5 per million BTUs yields electricity at 5¢/kWh from a combined-cycle gas turbine. That sets a pretty tough bar for wind, especially when gas turbines can produce power on-demand, 24/7, while wind turbines generate power an average of 30% of the time, intermittently.

Unexpectedly, wind power may also be facing competition from solar power. In a recent interview the CEO of NRG Energy Inc., a large power generator, pointed to the greater opportunities for innovation in solar, compared to wind. The cost of installed photovoltaic modules, particularly in utility-scale applications, has fallen much faster in recent years than the cost of wind turbines. That's not to say that power from solar is cheaper than from wind, but solar is starting to look like a better investment for utilities, which have been signing PPAs with solar project developers in droves. It's also noteworthy that for the first time last year more solar power was installed in Europe than new wind power, by a healthy margin.

It's probably premature to conclude that the US wind boom has ended, and that wind capacity is now likely to grow at lower, more normal rates in the future, compared to its extraordinary past performance. This could just be a lull, as the enormous additions of the last few years are absorbed into a power grid that is still modernizing and remains a long way from the smart grid that will be needed to accommodate much larger contributions from intermittent renewables of all types. At the same time, it's worth noting that government incentives can't eliminate every obstacle that renewables face, and that arguments that the Treasury cash grants in lieu of tax credits should be extended beyond 2011 should be assessed with much more critical judgment than was possible in the scramble of a lame duck Congressional session.

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Cutting the Federal Budget Wisely

This week the administration issued its third budget since taking office in January 2009. In a year otherwise focused on belt-tightening, the proposal includes a 12% increase for the Department of Energy, focused on additional R&D for renewables and nuclear power. The increase would be offset by cuts in fossil energy programs and the elimination elsewhere in the budget of various tax deductions and tax credits--"tax expenditures" in Beltway parlance--that benefit the US oil and gas industry. Also new for this year are proposed additional fees on the industry to cover the increased cost of issuing drilling permits in the aftermath of the Deepwater Horizon accident, along with another provision to raise the cost of holding inactive oil and gas leases. Aside from the politics involved, this exercise reminds me of the periodic waves of cost-cutting I experienced at Texaco, Inc. in the 1980s and '90s. Unfortunately, the government hasn't yet learned the vital lesson that my former company and many in other industries finally figured out after years of experience: Reducing expenses only helps your bottom line when the items you are cutting contribute less in revenue than they cost.

Start with the oil and gas subsidies, which I've discussed previously. The newly submitted budget estimates these at approximately $4 billion per year. As we heard the President say in his latest State of the Union address, "I'm asking Congress to eliminate the billions in taxpayer dollars we currently give to the oil companies. (Applause.) I don't know if--I don't know if you've noticed, but they're doing just fine on their own. (Laughter.) So instead of subsidizing yesterday's energy, let's invest in tomorrow's." It's a guaranteed applause line, as the White House's own text indicates, despite including potentially serious errors of fact.

Now, one could argue in the abstract whether a tax credit or deduction constitutes a gift of "taxpayer money" (i.e., the government's) or an opportunity for the taxpayer in question to remit less of his own money to the government. I know how I feel about that when it comes to filing my form 1040. One might even arrive at different answers in different situations. As a practical matter, however, what counts in the current context is not whose money this is in the first place, but whether taking more of it leaves either the federal government or the US economy better off. Even from the perspective of tax revenue, a recent study found that after an initial increase, the long-term impact of higher taxes on the oil & gas industry resulted in reduced government revenue. Higher taxes on US oil & gas production will translate into less of both--and so less to tax--while also yielding more future imports and higher trade deficits, along with reduced energy security.

The President's remarks also suggested incorrectly that oil and gas are yesterday's energy, and not also today's and tomorrow's. In 2009 oil and gas accounted for 62% of our energy consumption, and the US Department of Energy expects them to continue to supply as much as 57% of our needs in 2035, after subtracting the contribution of liquid biofuels. Treating these key energy sources as undesirable could have serious consequences for our energy and economic security in the years ahead. Nor would it assist our efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Natural gas can contribute significantly to reducing the emissions from the power sector, which accounts for 40% of US CO2 emissions, and the main opportunities for reducing emissions from transportation, where most of our oil use takes place, are on the user side--conservation and more efficient cars, trucks and planes--and not on the extraction, refining and distribution side of the industry.

If the administration couldn't get these tax changes enacted in the previous Congress, they stand even less chance this term. However, that might not be the case for the additional "user fees" and lease fees, since they are new this year. The former are related to the redesign of the oversight agency for offshore drilling and were recommended by the Presidential commission investigating the accident. As I noted when their report came out, we already have a mechanism for recouping the expenses that the Bureau of Ocean Energy, Management, Regulation and Enforcement (formerly the Minerals Management Service) incurs in the course of reviewing leases and drilling permits and monitoring offshore activity. That mechanism is the lease bids and royalties that brought in $8 billion from onshore and offshore oil and gas in fiscal 2010. In a good year these sums could cover the entire Interior Dept. budget, let alone that of BOEMRE. Adding new fees on top of the existing royalties further reduces the attractiveness of drilling in US waters, on top of the "moratorium/permitorium" --now in its tenth month--for which critics finally received a belated explanation earlier this month. The net result of new fees would be less drilling here and more drilling in places like offshore Brazil.

Then there's the notion of "establishing fees for new non-producing oil and gas leases (both onshore and offshore) to encourage more timely production." This is clearly an outgrowth of the "idle leases" canard that was making the rounds in 2008. However, in light of protracted delays in issuing new permits and the likelihood that fewer permits will be issued in the future than in the past, it seems almost Kafkaesque to penalize companies for not drilling sooner on more of their leases. In truth, companies already pay twice for non-producing leases: once when they pay a bid bonus to acquire the lease, and then every year in the form of a lease rent that is due as long as the lease remains undeveloped. Companies factor this into the bonuses they bid, along with their assessment of the likelihood that a lease contains commercial quantities of oil or gas. Additional fees on non-producing leases seem likely to result in one or more of the following outcomes: lower bonus bids, fewer bids, and an increased focus outside the US. None of that would help either the deficit or energy security.

I'm entirely supportive of the government cutting expenses, including unwarranted subsidies, in order to begin the difficult task of bringing the federal budget closer to balance within the next few years. This seems essential if we're to avoid serious consequences for our credit rating, interest rates, and exchange rate. However, along the lines of what I saw when the oil industry reduced expenses in the aftermath of the big oil price drops of the mid-1980s and 1998-9, it would be counterproductive to do so in a manner that would actually result in lower overall tax receipts, while reducing domestic energy production in the bargain. Ultimately, it makes a lot more sense to target repealing the tax expenditures in question as part of the broader tax reform that seems inevitable if we want to get the deficit under control. That would eliminate specific tax breaks but simultaneously reduce overall corporate tax rates to make US industry more competitive globally, not less. A budget that proposes to double corporate income tax receipts by 2013--to a level higher than their 2007 asset bubble peak--is out of step with the competitiveness agenda that the administration has espoused, aside from its shortcomings in narrowing the long-term deficit.

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EV Rebates vs. Tax Credits

Having recently taken a hard look at the cost/benefit of the proposed expansion of federal electric vehicle tax credits up to $19 billion, it naturally caught my attention when I heard that the President was proposing to convert the present system of tax credits into point-of-sale rebates for EVs. Legislation has apparently been introduced to put that into effect, along with a significant expansion of federal grants to manufacturers of EV batteries and other components. Aside from my sense that taxpayers have already subsidized that industry sufficiently for its current stage of development, I have distinctly mixed feelings on the EV tax credit conversion, which seems likely to increase the cost of the program, though it would also increase its fairness.

When the Congress originally established this benefit under the TARP bill in October 2008, it opted for the most conservative of the three main ways it could have provided incentives to purchasers of electric vehicles. First, it chose tax credits rather than cash rebates. That at least provides a time value of money benefit to the government, though it opens the door to a certain amount of fraud. Tax credits also ensure that purchasers must be serious about their investment, since they have to pay more of their own money up front and then wait to recover it when they file their next tax return. But Congress raised the bar even higher by choosing to make the EV tax credits non-refundable. That means that not only must you wait to file your taxes to get the benefit, but the credit cannot exceed your annual tax liability in order to take advantage of the full amount. The last time I checked, that implied that a typical EV buyer would need to earn at least $55,000 per year if single, or $75,000 if married filing jointly--after normal deductions and exemptions. That makes buying an EV with the government's assistance a distinctly middle- to upper-middle-class proposition, at least.

The main advantage of turning the tax credit into a rebate is in making it available to more people, and in the process putting more EVs into the hands of less affluent buyers. That works two ways, by expanding the pool of those who would qualify for the incentive, and also by making it easier for buyers to qualify for financing an EV purchase by reducing the amount that had to be financed. I could envision this putting more people in EVs, sooner than under the current system. Of course that's also its chief drawback, from a taxpayer and federal borrowing perspective. The faster the money is spent, the quicker the deficit grows, or the more taxes must go up--or other programs be cut--to pay for it. It also appears that car dealers are less than enthusiastic about becoming the gatekeepers for this benefit.

Having generally supported the earlier "cash for clunkers" rebates, I was initially somewhat receptive to this idea, even if I didn't see similarly unique circumstances to justify it. However, I'd be a lot more enthusiastic if I thought the change were mainly driven by the imperative to improve our energy security--a logic negated by the paltry amount of oil the first few million EVs will save--instead of shoring up a somewhat arbitrary target that was announced in the recent State of the Union address and has attracted a fair amount of skepticism, including from the car industry that is supposed to execute it. In the end I come down on the side of my fellow taxpayers on this one. Let's leave the tax credit as is and allow the early adopters who qualify for the current version to help bring down the cost of EVs, so that more price-sensitive buyers won't need a $7,500 rebate to afford one later.

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Christmas for Renewables

Last night the US House of Representatives passed the compromise tax bill without any amendments and by a healthy margin, though narrower than the 81-19 vote in the Senate on Wednesday. The bill now goes to the President for his signature. The provisions added after the initial negotiations between the White House and Republican leadership delivered a substantial Christmas present to the nation's renewable energy industry, including several key items on the industry's wish list: extension of the ethanol blenders' tax credit at its current rate of $0.45 per gallon; extension of the Treasury Renewable Energy Grants, which provide cash in lieu of investment tax credits; and a retroactive extension of the $1.00 per gallon biodiesel tax credit, which had lapsed at the end of 2009. However, as with many Christmas presents, the bill that will come due next year is also substantial. And the one-year extensions granted to these incentives leaves their long-term fate in the hands of the new Congress, which is widely expected to be more focused on deficit reduction than on stimulus.

This result constitutes a remarkable trifecta. As recently as a week ago it seemed likely that the Treasury Grant program would expire on schedule, and that the ethanol credit, if not actually allowed to expire, would at least be reduced to reflect its redundancy with the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), which requires refiners and fuel blenders to add biofuel to gasoline. As for the biodiesel tax credit, it looked like a lost cause all year, having failed on multiple previous attempts to reinstate it. The US ethanol industry even prevailed in having the $0.54 per gallon duty on imported ethanol extended for another year, in order to shield taxpayers from paying incentives to foreign producers and the industry from cheaper competition--though I'm not sure how competitive Brazilian cane ethanol really is these days, with sugar trading at around $0.30/lb ex duty. (As I understand the tradeoff, a gallon of cane ethanol consumes roughly the same raw materials as 10 lb. of cane sugar.)

It's a tribute to the greatly expanded scale of renewable energy that the price tag for the one-year extension of these three incentives is as high as it will be. This year, even with US wind turbine installations running well behind their record pace in 2009, the Treasury has spent $3.9 billion on the grant program for projects installing geothermal, solar, wind and other renewable electricity equipment. With continued strong growth in both solar thermal and photovoltaic projects and even a modest uptick in wind installations, the tab for 2011 could easily break $4 B. (A separate manufacturers tax credit, which had a better claim on creating green jobs here in the US, was not extended.) Meanwhile, with conventional ethanol and biodiesel blended at the mandated rates for next year, they should account for around $5.9B and $0.8 B, respectively. That comes to $10.7 billion for all three programs.

Although the tax compromise has extended the energy policy status quo for another year, change is in the air. With continued, though narrower bi-partisan support, the ethanol industry's argument that its tax credit is still necessary after 32 years--even with a steadily increasing RFS mandate--is losing credibility. Part of the industry would prefer this money to be spent encouraging infrastructure for E85 and other higher-percentage blends that represent ethanol's future growth opportunity, if any. As for the Treasury Grants, a temporary stimulus measure intended to make up for the disappearance of the tax equity market during the financial crisis, the defensibility of treating the investment tax credit on which it is based differently from any other credit in the tax code is waning. This mechanism looks increasingly exposed as the broader category of "tax expenditures" becomes an obvious target for deficit cutters, and the justification for extending it beyond next year would probably vanish if the Congress enacted legislation along the lines of Senator Graham's Clean Energy Standard. The industry should make the most of the current Christmas package, because the odds are against a repetition of it turning up under next year's tree.

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