Oil Sands Royalties and Taxes in Alberta: An Assessment of Key Developments since the mid-1990s
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines oil sands royalty and tax systems that have either been proposed or implemented since the mid-1990s. Simulation models of oil sands production projects are constructed and the distribution of ex ante economic rents for various assumed crude oil price paths is calculated. The results suggest that until 2007 changes in royalties and taxes had been favorable to producers. The pattern of estimated real internal rates of return obtained through the simulations supports this conclusion. The recommendations of the provincially appointed Royalty Review Panel were anchored in the view that Alberta’s oil sands industry had matured since the mid-1990s and that a distribution of ex ante rents more favorable to Albertans, as owners of the resource, was thus warranted. In contrast, the changes proposed by the Government of Alberta in 2007 would effectively return the distribution of ex ante rents to what prevailed a decade earlier. However, the role of royalties (as opposed to corporate income tax) as means of capturing rents for governments is more important under the proposals made in 2007.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".