[basch]

It's not taxing the company doing the extraction, its taxing the company that owns the mineral rights (the land.) Those may likely be the same thing, but the extraction and refinement itself is still profitable.

It would be akin to the government pulling eminent domain, and saying "the oil under the country belongs to the people, not who owns the deed."

This is basically what Alaska did. They said "if you plunder our natural resources, the profit gets shared with the people whos natural resources you are plundering."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_Permanent_Fund