La documentación y los registros

British foreign energy policy has been, at best, controversial over the course of the last century or so. Keynesian politics may have come to dominate domestic energy policy, but geopolitics arguably continued to dominate international relations in energy over much of the 20th century. During Victorian times and the early 1900s Britain was a net exporter of coal. Some have suggested that large indigenous supplies of the world’s, at that time, primary energy source played a material part in Britain’s ability to maintain a hegemonic role, or ‘great power status’ (Katzenstein 1978; Bromley 1991; Painter 2002).

As oil came to replace coal, however, British foreign policy came to reflect the need to access oil and on acceptable economic and political terms. Britain moved form its longstanding position as a net exporter of energy to a being a large net importer of oil (Hartshorn 1966: 7). This material change was replicated in the mid 2000s when the UK moved from an, albeit shorter period, of net exports of oil and gas to a net importer of hydrocarbons. Britain’s switch to oil and its lack of indigenous supply was understood as having major foreign policy implications. Churchill had famously suggested that “…(t)o commit the Navy irrevocably to oil was indeed ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles’…” (Churchill in Yergin 1991: 12). There were widespread fears about reliance on distant and insecure oil supplies, but oil was considered, by

many including Churchill, so technologically superior to coal that the decision was made to switch the British Navy to run on oil.

As new finds of oil were increasingly being made outside the US, in the Middle East in particular, it was assumed that access to supplies at ‘reasonable’ prices would be enabled through British control of oil companies, particularly the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (Keohane 1984: 164).36 And through extensive diplomatic relations, particularly with the US, oil diplomacy became a central theme of foreign policy (Venn 1986; Keohane 1984). Britain maintained its foreign policy of supporting access to reserves on terms favourable to the ‘Seven Sisters’, which included British Petroleum and Shell.37 Access to oil from ‘Persia’ was maintained through a range of different, but inter-related, structures, partly corporate, partly ‘imperial’ and partly military (Tretault 2009: 376-7). When ‘oil diplomacy’ failed military means were sometimes adopted. An oft cited example is US and British support for the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadeq Administration, which had nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in 1951. In retrospect, the extent to which Britain was prepared to protect access militarily became clear (Painter 2002), although at the time the decision to become involved in Iran was taken under conditions of ‘secretised’ depoliticisation.

Not long after the overthrow of Iran’s Mossadeq, another international event, the ‘Suez Crisis’ was more widely perceived as threatening to British energy supply security. It has been argued that as a result of this crisis the British Government made a specific decision to treble in size the already planned nuclear power programme (Helm 2003: 34). This, in turn, implies an increasing awareness of the risks of depending on too few sources of energy, the emergence of new, non-carbon based technologies, as well as of links between perceptions of crisis, in the form of supply insecurity, and policy change. Nuclear electricity, in that it can be produced domestically, has in addition often been the response of UK government’s to perceptions of supply insecurity.

36  _{In  1939  British  companies  still  accounted  for  around  half  of  oil  production  outside  the  US  and  the}  

USSR  (Painter  1993).  

37  _{The  ‘Seven  Sisters’  are  the  oil  companies  which  dominated  international  trade  in  oil  for  a  substantial}  

part  of  the  20th  century.    They  included  five  American  and  two  British  companies.    Although  the  

American  companies  were  privately  owned  and  managed,  they  received  considerable  quantities  of  state   support  over  time  in  terms  of  tax  breaks,  diplomatic  support,  and,  where  deemed  necessary,  military   support  in  order  to  maintain  access  to  oil  at  acceptable  prices  (Yergin  2001;  Painter  2002).  

The period following on from the early 1950s was one in which there was a low and stable world oil price, growing international oil trade, and a “…greater ability of oil companies to control both the supply and price of oil…” (Chesshire 1986: 395). This was accompanied by very little concern in Britain, as was the case in the 1990s, about long-term global energy availability. It is also worth noting briefly, however, that although the 1950s and 1960s also marked the start of a substantial increase in international agreements and organisations, many of which covered trade, energy remained remarkably free of international agreement (Keohane 1984; McGowan 2008). The European Union, which started life as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951, did not actually manage to come to agreement on energy (McGowan 2008; Natorski and Surrallez 2008). When the internal market of the EU was launched in 1992, the energy sector was left out, although attempts have recently, in 2007, been re- instated to launch an ‘Energy Policy for Europe’ (McGowan 2008: 93; EC 2011: editorial).

1.3 1970s ‘Oil Shocks’: Energy and Crisis

In the last three decades we have become so increasingly dependent on imported energy that today our economy and well-being are hostage to decisions made by nations thousands of miles away… The energy crisis has placed at risk all of this nation’s objectives in the world.

(Kissinger in Strange 1988: 204)

The two ‘oil shocks’ of 1973 and 1979 swiftly reversed energy policy trends. The shocks, once more, prompted broad and extensive public debate about energy in Britain and the West. There was a renewed emphasis on international threats to security of supply, defined as reliable supplies at affordable prices, this time from OPEC. Over the course of the 1970s complacency gave way to acute concern that total global energy consumption had, over the previous decades, been doubling every 15 years (Chesshire 1986: 396). The depth and breadth of public concern were unsurprising given OPEC’s decisions, consumption growth, the sudden quadrupling of oil prices in 1973 and various economic and social knock-on effects across Britain (Hay 1999; Helm 2003; cf. David Steel in Ezra 1983: 196). One of the most clear cut political responses internationally was the formation of the International Energy Agency (IEA) to attempt to co-ordinate consumer nations’ energy strategies, to improve communication and

technology sharing (Leaver 2005: 92; cf. Friedrichs 2010: 3).38 The IEA recommended that member countries seek to become more energy efficient, improve excess storage facilities and look to diversify access both geographically and in terms of energy source (Yergin 2006).

The oil shocks also prompted a much wider review of energy policy in Britain (Chesshire 1986: 396). In 1974, in the immediate aftermath of the first crisis, it was decided that Britain needed a Department of Energy (DoE) once more, only five years after the Ministry of Power had been merged into the Ministry of Technology. Again, we can draw parallels between renewed fears about energy supply security mounting in the mid 2000s and the formation of Department for Energy and Climate Change (DECC) in 2008. Although in the period between oil shocks energy policy did not undergo a profound structural shift, aside from the re-instatement of the DoE, a wide number of changes were made. The price shocks were interpreted as another reminder of the dangers associated with a lack of diversity in energy supply and as such, the nuclear and coal industries, as domestically based, received another boost in Britain, as well as in France, the United States and Germany (Chesshire 1986: 396). In an associated political reaction the first, albeit small, state support programme for ‘renewable’ energy was also established (van der Horst 2005: 705).

Oil and gas had, however, been discovered in the late 1960s in the UK Continental Shelf (UKCS) region of the North Sea and production from these sites started in the 1970s. In a move again not dissimilar to initial reactions to perceptions of energy insecurity in the 2000s, Britain also responded to the 1973 oil crisis by decreeing a boost in output from the UKCS with the intention of becoming ‘self sufficient’ by the end of the decade (Katzenstein 1978: 296). So although diversity in terms of source and geographic location of energy was being overtly encouraged, and at this stage also by the IEA, there ran alongside a tendency to concentrate on energy independence and on domestic production as an antidote to international insecurities. By the 1980s oil and gas were to become a serious boost to the coffers of the UK Treasury (Kemp and Stephen 2007: 183).

38  _{Other  energy  organisations  were  set  up  in  response  to  the  1973  oil  shock,  such  as  the  ASEAN  Council}  

The Department of Energy produced a ‘consultative document’ on energy policy in 1978, in the immediate aftermath of the second ‘oil shock’ (DoE 1978). This document was primarily concerned with questions of energy security and it took the view that “…energy policy is necessarily concerned with a long time horizon…” and with the wider world energy scene (Rutledge 2007: 902). Concerns were expressed about longer-term availability of oil

… there is wide agreement that world oil supplies cannot continue to increase for much more than a decade or so and will thereafter become increasingly scarce and expensive (DoE 1978: 1)

Diversity of supply source, therefore, also remained a priority and energy policy would be required to deliver on this. The objectives of energy policy were focused, unsurprisingly, on the provision of adequate and secure supplies of energy but with an eye to the least social cost, and the efficient allocation of resources. It was understood that energy policy could intervene to change the pattern of energy use in order to ensure development of energy sources in accordance with the national interest (DoE 1978 in Webb 1985: 28).

2.     The  Evolution  of  the  PEPP:  Ideas  about  Energy  and  Governance