Abstract
In the years following World War II, global demand for oil increased continually, and Western European governments pursued various political and diplomatic strategies to obtain hydrocarbons as further reserves were revealed across the world. The tensions of the Cold War increased national concerns over energy security yet further, and in this chapter we shall discuss some aspects of the particular strategies employed by two leading Western European administrations to gain at least some control over the sources of their supply. These strategies included maneuvers such as stockpiling, encouraging diversification of supply, and, when the opportunity arose, controlling access to resources on home soil and abroad. This control required the mobilization of state and commercial geological surveying to obtain “geostrategic intelligence,” that is, gathering information on what oil and gas reserves could be found underground; finding out what others (whether enemies or allies, co-producers, or business rivals) already knew about these reserves; and what acquisition strategies they had put in place. Surveillance in terms of both geophysical exploration and intelligence-gathering was therefore an essential element of oil security, an element often neglected in the existing literature on the history of oil exploration.1 Oil surveillance operations also produced conflicts between diplomats, firm managers, government officials, and geoscientists of different countries. As Robert Jervis more generally shows, the bolstering of energy security through surveillance activities by one administration made its neighbors feel less reassured about their own security.2
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Notes
This is, for example, the case for: Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money, and Power (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009);
André Nouschi, La France et le pétrole: de 1924 à nos jours (Paris: Picard, 2001);
Jean Prouvost (ed.) La recherche pétrolière française (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1994).
Robert Jervis, “Cooperation Under the Security Dilemma,” World Politics, 30:2 (1978): 167–214;
R. Jervis, “Was the Cold War a Security Dilemma?” Journal of Cold War Studies, 3 (2001): 36–60.
James H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company, volume 2: the Anglo-Iranian Years, 1928–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
On the postwar reconstruction of France from a political and diplomatic point of view, see: Irwin M. Wall, The United States and the Making of Postwar France, 1945–1954 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991);
William I. Hitchcock, France Restored: Cold War Diplomacy and the Quest for Leadership in Europe, 1944–1954 (Chapel Hill/London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998);
Jean-Pierre Rioux, The Fourth Republic, 1944–1958 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).
Irvine H. Anderson, ARAMCO. The United States and Saudi Arabia. A Study of the Dynamics of Foreign Oil Policy, 1933–1950 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), 153–154.
Also in: Nouschi, La France et le pétrole, 198. See also: A. Nouschi, “Un tournant de la politique pétrolière française: les Heads of Agreement de novembre 1948,” Relations Internationales 44 (1985): 379–389;
Burton I. Kaufman, The Oil Cartel Case: A Documentary Study of Antitrust Activity in the Cold War Era (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1978), 123–36.
Jean Rondot, La Compagnie Française des Pétroles. Du franc-or au pétrole-franc (Paris: Plon, 1962), 93–95;
Michael B. Stoff, Oil, War, and American Security. The Search for a National Policy on Foreign Oil, 1941–1947 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 200.
Pierre Fontaine, La morte étrange de Conrad Kilian, inventeur du pétrole saharien (Paris: Les Sept Couleurs, 1959), Chaps. 6–7.
Henri Bonnet to the US Under-Secretary of State for Economic Affairs William L. Clayton, January 4, 1947, Foreign Relations of the United States (1947), V, 627–9, NARA.
Emmanuel Catta, Victor De Metz. De la CFP au Groupe TOTAL (Paris: Total Edition Presse, 1990). See also Rondot, La Compagnie Française des Pétroles, 97.
Pierre Péan in George-Henri Soutou and Alain Beltran (eds.), Pierre Gullaumat, la passion des grands projets industriels (Paris: Rive Droite, 1995), 12–13;
P. Péan and Jean-Pierre Séréni, Les émirs de la République (Paris: Seuil, 1982), 28.
C. Layat, A. Clement, G. Pommier, and A. Buffet, “Some Technical Aspects of Refraction Seismic Prospecting in the Sahara,” Geophysics 26:4 (1961): 437–46.
See also: A. Beltran and Sophie Chauveau, Elf Aquitaine, des origines a 1989 (Paris: Fayard, 1998), 59.
On the Monnet Plan see Gérard Bossuat, La France, l’aide américaine et la construction européenne, 1944–1954 (Paris: Comité pour l’histoire économique et financière de la France, 1997).
Giovanni Buccianti, Enrico Mattei: Assalto al potere petrolifero mondiale (Milan: Giuffrè, 2005), 151–152.
A. Morange, A. Perrodon, and F. Héritier, Les grandes heures de l‘exploration pétrolière du groupe ELF Aquitaine (Boussens: Elf Aquitaine Éditions, 1992), 97. See also Perrodon, “Historique des recherches pétrolières en Algérie,” 327.
Leucha Veneer, “Oil Security and the North Sea: British Explorations in the 1960s,” unpublished paper. On British attitudes at NATO, see also Roberto Cantoni, “Oily Deals. Exploration, Diplomacy and Security in early Cold War France and Italy,” Ph.D. thesis, Manchester: University of Manchester, 2014, chapter 5.
P. E. Kent, “North Sea Exploration—A Case History,” The Geographical Journal 133:3 (1967), 289–301, on 290.
See also P. E. Kent, “The North Sea—Evolution of a Major Oil and Gas Play,” Facts and Principles of World Petroleum Occurrence 6 (1980): 633–652.
Øystein Noreng, Oil Industry and Government Strategy (Boulder, CO: ICEED, 1980), 40;
see also Helge Ryggvik, The Norwegian Oil Experience: A Toolbox for Managing Resources? (Oslo: University of Oslo, 2010), 11.
Ministry of Power, Fuel Policy. Presented to Parliament by the Minister of Power by Command of Her Majesty, November 1967 (London: HMSO, 1967), 5.
For an overview see: UN Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea, “The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (A Historical Perspective),” 2012. Available at: , accessed January 29, 2014. See also D. C. Watt, “Britain and North Sea Oil: Policies Past and Present,” The Political Quarterly 47:2 (1976), 377–397, on 378.
Ibidem. For an overview on the institution’s history see: Harold E. Wilson, Down to Earth: One Hundred and Fifty Years of the British Geological Survey (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1985). Post-1967 developments are examined in Dennis Hackett, “Our Corporate History: Key Events Affecting the British Geological Survey, 1967–1998,” British Geological Survey Technical Report WQ/99/1 (available at: , accessed August 19 2013).
G. A. L. Johnson, “Sir Kingsley Charles Dunham, 1910–2001,” Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society 49 (2003): 147–162, on 155.
Richard Aldrich, Espionage, Security, and Intelligence in Britain, 1945–1970 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 60.
On this committee, see Jon Agar and Brian Balmer, “British Scientists and the Cold War: the Defence Research Policy Committee and Information Networks, 1947–1963,” Historical Studies in the Physical Sciences 28:2 (1998): 209–252.
Dunham to R. J. H. Beverton (received December 21, 1967), “Investigation by the IGS of the Geophysics of the North Sea,” POWE 63/201, TNA. On the Labour proposal, see Fuel Study Group, “A National Hydrocarbons Corporation,” London: Labour Party, 1968. See also Watts, “Britain and North Sea Oil,” 383.
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© 2014 Simone Turchetti and Peder Roberts
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Cantoni, R., Veneer, L. (2014). Underground and Underwater: Oil Security in France and Britain during the Cold War. In: Turchetti, S., Roberts, P. (eds) The Surveillance Imperative. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438744_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137438744_3
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