The first oil well in the world was drilled in PA in 1859, so a lot of laws about mineral rights in the US date back to that time period or even earlier. While it varies by state, for the most part you own whatever is on or under your land, be that timber, gold, copper, oil, gas, etc. Basically the owners of the land can do with the resources as the please and they pay taxes the same as any other business.
Now these days quite a bit of oil and gas is on public land like offshore leases or BLM land. In this case the public does actually own the resources and companies bid to lease various blocks of land and then have to pay a royalty of a certain amount. In general though the system is designed to maximize the production rate of these resources which while it may have made sense in the 1800's and early 1900's when production was very low, the resource base was "huge", and the benefits of using the energy was so great (read industrial revolution). Of course things have changed just a bit in the past century and a half....
For the most part oil and gas pretty much go to the nearest refinery of processing facility and is then piped around the country wherever it is needed. The basic idea is to minimize the transportation costs. For the most part all oil and gas produced in the US is used here, although there are some export flows, mainly of processed fuels (gasoline or diesel) since we generally have larger refining capacity than we need and there are certain locations say in Canada or Mexico that may be closer to a US refinery than a Mexican or Canadian refinery so we "export" to them, but on net we import more from both countries.
As for royalties and taxes, those things can and are changed like any other law. I also know many states charge "severance taxes" on natural resources extracted within their state, even if it's on private land.
