The Ministry of Energy is preparing a new tax maneuver for the oil industry

The Ministry of Energy is preparing a new tax maneuver, which involves reducing the burden on the oil industry and doubling investments in it. This will have a multiplicative effect on related industries, which, according to the Ministry's idea, will replenish the budget. This was stated by Anton Rubtsov, head of the Department of Oil and Gas Complex of the Ministry of Energy, in his speech at the meeting of the subcommittee on energy of "Business Russia", sources familiar with the discussion of the event told "Izvestia".

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According to one of them, the tax burden can be reduced by expanding the system of additional income tax (AIT) or benefits for mineral extraction tax (MET). As for geological exploration, "these may be instruments related to some deductions for other taxes."

Another interlocutor noted that the agency intends to work "carefully" in this direction with the Ministry of Finance. And to prescribe the implementation of this strategy in the "action plan" for work under the Energy Strategy-2050.

"This is work for more than one year," the interlocutor noted.

According to experts, Russia will be able to keep production at the level of 540 million tons in the next 5-10 years even only at the expense of old fields in Western Siberia, but with increasing costs.

According to them, the share of hard-to-recover reserves in production already exceeds 30%, and to compensate for the natural decline in production (4-6% per year), it is necessary to drill more and deeper, which affects the cost of production.

In general, Izvestia's interlocutors note that the idea of a permanent increase in the tax burden on the oil industry should be abandoned and the focus should be shifted to other industries where the level of fiscal exemptions is significantly lower, such as ferrous and non-ferrous metallurgy, banking and telecommunications sector.

Read more in Izvestia's exclusive article:

Backup option: the authorities are preparing a new tax maneuver for the oil industry