In the early 1980's, the governments of Canada and Newfoundland disagreed concerning jurisdiction over the Hibernia oil field. The dispute revealed the belief that the scope and kind of economic benefits generated by the development would depend on which level of government had control. Differences in objectives could have practical significance only if there exist control instruments with which to influence the pattern of resource exploitation. We examine one such instrument here. The government of a province or state can most strongly influence the form of the extraction program through direct management. As it may be difficult for such a government to recruit the necessary expertise, it might have no alternative but to import this by encouraging outside firms to extract, in return for shares of the profits. The local government is assumed to be interested in using the newly-found revenues to finance a project, such as a college or other training facility, which will provide benefits after the deposit is exhausted. Such a project would require a near-constant flow of funds over many periods. An extraction firm maximizes the total discounted profit by extracting successively declining amounts each period unless the discount rate is zero and there are no stock effects on marginal extraction cost. This implies that revenue from taxes on production or profit will also decline through time. Use of such taxes alone would force the government to save significant portions of the revenues from early periods to fund its new program later on. This can create political problems for democratically elected officials, since surpluses indicate to voters that their tax bills are excessive. A forward-looking government could earmark the newly found revenue to fund the new program, effectively instituting a precommitment device (see Strotz 1955-56). Its next task would be to find a way of altering the declining revenue flow so that tax collections over time are even, or nearly so. One simplistic solution would have the government require a fixed payment