Representatives of North Dakota's petroleum industry say tax revenue from oil and natural gas benefits everyone in North Dakota -- not just the western counties where the oil was produced.
The North Dakota Petroleum Council and the Western Dakota Energy Association released a new study of oil and gas production and extraction taxes -- which shows that in fiscal year 2022, the taxes brought in $2.8 billion.
"In fact, over the last five years, just the production and extraction taxes, were just over 51 percent of the taxes collected by the state," said Brent Bogar with AE2S, the firm that did the study. "Since the start of the Bakken, that's 45 percent of the taxes collected by the state, just in production and extraction taxes."
Bogar said that does not include sales taxes or income taxes.
Sen. Brad Bekkedahl (R-Williston) said that, after a meeting of the interim Energy Development and Transmission Committee in 2017, one of the Committee members said to him that all of that tax money goes to the West. And Bekkedahl said that perception may still be out there.
"We have an information gap in our legislators," Bekkedahl said. "And we probably have an information gap among the citizens of North Dakota as well."
Bekkedahl encouraged the associations to promote that information among state lawmakers and the citizens at large.