The Nation - News from June 19, 1985

Oil industry representatives urged Congress to resist proposed cuts in tax deductions for drilling costs or risk an energy squeeze that would make the drastic oil price increases of the 1970s look tame. “It would make 1973 and 1979 look like a cakewalk,” Charles J. DiBona, president of the American Petroleum Institute, told the House Ways and Means Committee as it weighed energy provisions of President Reagan’s tax plan. Domestic oil production would drop by 20% to 50% in five years if Congress dried up the deduction for “intangible drilling costs,” industry executives told the tax-writing panel.