Intangible Drilling Costs Research – Term Paper

Research question

1.    What is the importance of IDCs in the natural gas and oil industry of the US?

2.    What are the potential impacts of repealing IDCs on the natural gas and oil industry of the US?

3.    What options are there for the reform?

It is within the intentions of the researcher to answer this questions so as to provide a comprehensive overview of the impacts of repealing IDCs and suggest a way forward to protecting and defending the viability of oil and natural gas business in the US.

IDC deduction research methodology

Researchers are advised to choose research methods that best suit their research problems.  The failure to choose appropriate research method and approaches often jeopardize the validity and reliability of research findings, and often shed a bad light on the competence of researchers in as far their acquaintance with research endeavors is concerned. For example, researchers may decide to use primary, secondary, or both sources to generate relevant data for their studies (Rogers & Price Waterhouse, 1985). Among the advantage of using primary sources of data is the ability of the researcher to conduct an in-depth exploration, thereby gaining insight into various elements of the study phenomena, especially those that other studies fail to address. Primary data are mostly considered reliable, and researchers have the capacity to control the accuracy of findings through the deployment of reliable and well-founded data collection methods. Even so, secondary sources were deemed appropriate for the current study given the magnitude of reliable and high-quality work done in the field (Deshmukh, 2006). What is more, using secondary sources is advisable for a study such as this, which has a wide research scope.  The argument finds rationale in the facts that secondary research can build on already existing findings, thereby noting and addressing key research questions with least resources and shortest time possible (Burke, 2016).

IDC research selection procedure

Phrases such as ‘impacts of repealing IDCs,’ ‘IDCs in America’s oil and gas industry,’ ‘industrial consequences of repealing IDCs,’ ‘meaning of  intangible drilling cost,’ ‘arguments supporting and opposing repealing IDCs ,’ ‘options of IDCs reforms’ were used because of their relevance to the three research questions of this study. These research terms were deemed justifiable bearing in mind their open structure, which guaranteed a rich yield of articles dealing with the industrial and overall impacts of repealing the IDCs.

From the information contained in the titles of the research, the first selection left the researcher with 50 articles after employing the inclusion criteria. The second level of the search was further refined using the abstract of articles to eliminate the non-relevant articles, yielding a total of 33 papers. The third selection was aimed at reducing the number of the articles selected by evaluating the information contained in the introduction and the results section to determine whether the outcome is in line with the aim of the research- a process that yielded 21 secondary sources. The researcher read in full all the 21pieces of literature, eliminating 11 papers that did not match the inclusion criteria and were eliminated. This step also involved looking at the connection between the article’s research questions, the methods used in the article’s research and the results, discussion and conclusion of the article. Articles that met the inclusion-exclusion criteria while also addressing the needs of this study, which is to understand the impact of repealing IDCs on private investors, were chosen. The procedure ended with ten selected articles that met all the inclusion criteria. The ten articles were selected because they explored the essence of IDCs and the proposed reforms on America’s domestic oil and natural gas industry. These articles were also chosen because they satisfied all the three provisions of my inclusion criteria.

Inclusion and Exclusion Criteria

First, the inclusion criteria in this study consist of whether the study includes appropriate research methods. For example, a series of quantitative, qualitative, mixed, and literature review were chosen based on the appropriateness of the selected methods in exploring respective dimensions of IDCs and the proposed reforms. What is more, only studies published in the English language were reviewed.

Systematic Analysis of the Reviewed Articles

The process included examining each paper to find out how IDCs influenced the domestic oil and gas industry of the US, and predict the impacts of repealing IDCs.

References

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Nadel, S., Farley, K., ; American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy. (2012). Modifying how energy costs are treated for business tax purposes in order to decrease subsidies and increase energy efficiency. Washington, D.C: American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy.

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Deshmukh, A. (January 01, 2006). The Expenditure Cycle.

Burke, J. F. (January 27, 2016). Petroleum industry taxation helps fuel the oilpatch merger mania. Strategic Plan. Energy Manage, 71-75.