Some people are never happy. Last week’s news that Chevron and two other oil companies had discovered an Alaska-size well in the Gulf of Mexico cheered American consumers, who can now hope for lower energy prices when the new supply hits markets in a few years, and markets, which sent petroleum futures lower. But the solons and the business desk at the New YorkTimes simply refuse to applaud. Instead, the Times is worried that a clerical error dating from 1998 or 1999 may exempt Chevron from $1 billion in royalties it would otherwise pay to the federal government for oil extracted from the site. Congressional hearings are on the way.

Chevron, like most other companies exploring offshore, leases territory from the federal government. In exchange, the companies are supposed to pay a royalty on each barrel they extract. Amid the low prices of the 1990s, the government offered to waive the royalties to encourage more exploration. The exemption was supposed to phase out as crude prices rose, but Clinton administration lawyers inexplicably omitted that clause from the contracts they signed with the companies. The value of the royalty relief, which is calculated as a percentage of the barrel price, has soared along with crude prices. Ever since the Times first started caterwauling about this glitch in March, Congress has been trying to strong-arm big oil out of the theoretically binding contracts the government itself signed.

Never mind that Chevron might end up paying a “royalty” directly to the public in the form of reduced oil prices once production starts. Our back-of-the-envelope calculations offer a tantalizing hint at how big that “royalty” could be. Discovery of the well was announced on September 5. On September 1, the last trading day before the announcement, October futures contracts closed at $69.19. On September 6, futures closed at $67.50. Multiply those prices out by the 20.7 million barrels of petroleum Americans consume every day, and the savings from Chevron’s announcement works out to about $35 million every day.

By our count, that suggests Chevron will have handed $1 billion back to American consumers after 28 days, not counting the effects of other recent events pushing crude prices down even further. So in a sense, exploration and drilling is its own royalty to the American public for use of public lands. It’s just that allowing market forces to work this way is allowing the oil companies to repay the public without the money sifting through Congress’s greedy hands.