The revenue source Obama does not want

Merrill Mathews:

In his quest for more revenue, President Obama seems willing to push us off the fiscal cliff. But there is a way to generate massive new revenues without raising taxes.

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Where the federal government does have control — federal lands and offshore, as in the Gulf of Mexico — the president has opposed, delayed or slow-walked any efforts to expand energy extraction.

How bad has it been? Nobel Royalties Inc., an oil and gas acquisitions company, has released a study examining the decline in drilling on federal lands under the Obama administration. Using Bureau of Land Management statistics, the study found that in the lower 48 states there were 126.6 million cumulative federal acres leased in 1984 compared to just 38.9 million in 2010. That's a 30-year low.

The study also asserts that on federal lands, 91% of resources are either inaccessible or restricted due to the government.

Oil and gas companies pay royalties to the federal government when they drill on federal land. If the Obama administration opened up this land for energy development, the new royalties generated could add up to hundreds of billions of dollars.

A 2011 study from the consulting firm Wood Mackenzie found that "U.S. policies which encourage the development of new and existing resources could, by 2030, increase domestic oil and natural gas production by over 10 million BOED (barrels of oil equivalent per day) ... and raise over $800 billion of cumulative additional government revenue."

Since that study oil and gas projections have increased significantly based on new extraction technologies, so it may be unintentionally low-balling the real numbers.

In its economic projections, Nobel Royalties estimated that if the administration were to simply allow leasing to gradually trend upward to normal patterns, the federal government would take in $442 billion in royalties from federal land between 2013 and 2042. And it would get $363 billion in royalties from offshore projects.

That's a total of $785 billion in new revenue going directly into federal coffers.
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I have been making this argument for at least four and a half years, using basically the same numbers.  I do think Mathews is right that these projections probably understate the potential for both energy and royalties.  In the Eagle Ford formation in Texas the production in 2011 alone matched the 10 year projection.  The Bakken shale has also been out performing projections, and leases were recently signed for a shale formation south of San Francisco  that is estimated to be twice the size of the combined Bakken and Eagle Ford formations.  This does not even speak to production from Ohio and the gas formations in the Marcellus shale that will add to the available hydro carbons.

Alaska also has significant untapped potential that Democrats have kept locked up for mostly dubious reasons.

One idea that should be considered is to put the royalty income from federal sites into a real trust fund that would be used to cover the cost of Social Security and replace the money that has been take out of the so called trust fund to pay current operating expenses.