The 2013 budget that President Obama released today would raise more than $55 billion over the next decade by imposing new financial obligations on the fossil fuel and chemical industries -- a sweeping shift with few new component parts but an enduring ability to drive partisan drama on Capitol Hill.

Among the proposals Obama made to raise money for his long-term agenda, which includes notable Energy Department efficiency and renewables efforts, is a bid to impose the Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund tax on shale-based and synthetic crudes. The latter of those fuels, which would run through the controversial proposed Keystone XL pipeline, is now exempt from the per-barrel tax under a year-old Internal Revenue Service guidance, as E&E reported last week (E&E Daily, Feb. 8).

The White House proposal met with immediate jeers from congressional Republicans. While few took specific aim at the president's framework for revamping federal energy supports, his aides' projection of a $900 billion deficit for the fiscal year that starts in October served as a political bull's-eye for the GOP to hit.

The Senate Budget Committee's top Republican, Jeff Sessions of Alabama, lamented in an interview with Bloomberg Television that the $1 trillion-plus in tax increases proposed by the president "were used not to reduce debt" but "to pay for new spending."

On a separate front, however, House GOP leaders softened their position on whether new revenue, from oil industry taxes or from a federal-worker pay freeze, would be needed to offset a 10-month extension of Obama's signature payroll tax cut (see related story).

Thomas Pyle, president of the oil-industry-backed Institute for Energy Research, offered a preview of more energy-focused budget criticism to come from the GOP. Pyle issued a statement that accused the administration of "doubling down on failed energy policies that give taxpayer-funded handouts to the administration's political allies and require thousands of new federal regulators to fight an ideological crusade against affordable sources like coal, oil and natural gas."

But the oil and gas industry's leading federal trade group, the American Petroleum Institute (API), told E&E that it is amenable to a conversation about imposing the per-barrel oil-spill tax on Canadian oil sands and shale crude, while increasing it by 1 cent next year and by another 1-cent margin in 2017, as Obama proposed.

API tax policy manager Stephen Comstock said via email that his group "is open to discussing the definition of crude for purposes of the oil spill tax as well as discussing with policy makers as to whether the [Oil Spill Liability Trust Fund] is adequately funded to meet future needs."

Inside the revenue-raisers

The White House projected that its proposed changes to the oil-spill tax would raise $717 million over 10 years. Today's budget also included a $27 billion repeal of oil and gas tax breaks often condemned by congressional Democrats and a $29.5 billion hit to tax benefits for the coal industry.

Under the president's budget, coal companies would see several other smaller new financial responsibilities, most of which are returning after being proposed unsuccessfully in previous years (see related story).

The president's budget also would reinstate the Superfund tax on oil, gas and chemical companies after 17 years of dormancy, raising an estimated $21 billion over 10 years. Two other energy-related levies Obama would impose to raise $1 billion over 10 years, a pesticide-registration fee and an electronic hazardous waste tracking system, played a central role in his September proposal to the failed deficit-cutting congressional "supercommittee."

Not included in E&E's tally of energy-related revenue-raisers were tax and fee changes that would hit other industries besides fossil fuels and chemicals, such as the repeal of a punitive-damages tax deduction that saved Exxon Mobil Corp. about half a billion dollars on its public settlement following the 1989 Valdez oil spill, according to the Congressional Research Service.

That change to the tax treatment of punitive damages would raise $319 million over 10 years, the White House estimated.

Harkening back to the fizzling-out of the supercommittee, Senate Budget Chairman Kent Conrad (D-N.D.) described the Obama budget as a show of good faith for future negotiations to eliminate the pending sequester of more than $1 trillion in discretionary spending that was triggered when that congressional panel failed to reach a deal.

The president "has demonstrated that he wants to reach such an agreement" to cut long-term deficits and avoid the sequester, Conrad said in a statement. "Now others are going to have to be willing to step up and be part of the solution."