On the security of oil supplies, oil weapons, oil nationalism and all that

Concerns about energy supply security are not new. They emerged as regards oil on a number of occasions even before the shocks of 1973. In the years immediately following World War I, the view that the world was running out of oil suddenly emerged. This was an early version of the peak oil theory, which is attracting so much attention today. New discoveries in Iraq and Venezuela in the 1920s, and soon later that of the super giant East Texas field in the United States, gave rise to the opposite concern—the threat of a glut rather than shortages. The Mexican nationalisations of the late 1930s aggravated the US and the British governments not because of supply concerns but because their oil companies had lost highly profitable concessions. In 1941, Japan faced serious oil supply problems as the US had imposed an oil embargo after the Japanese invasion of Southern Indochina. The consequence was Pearl Harbor and the US entry into war. In 1951, the attempted nationalisation of Iranian oil by Mossadegh brought about the realisation that the Middle East cannot be taken for granted and that politics really mattered. But Mossadegh failed. The nationalisation of the Suez Canal by Nasser in 1956 revived the concern. The Anglo–French–Israeli military adventure caused Egypt to sink boats in the Canal.This was a temporary problem which led to the building of supertankers (VLCCs and ULCCs) that took Saudi and Kuwaiti oil to Europe around the Cape. The security of oil supply became the real and more permanent issue as a result of the 1973 events—the emergence of OPEC as the administrator of oil prices in international trade and the imposition of production cuts and embargoes on the US and Holland byArab oil-exporting countries. Interestingly, these events coincided with the pronouncements of the Club of Rome about the depletion of mineral resources. We had there once more a forerunner of the peak oil theory. It was perhaps the embargo and the production cuts of October 1973, more than the sudden oil price increase, which induced among civil servants in the US, Europe and Japan a seemingly permanent fear about supply security. Dr Marcello Colitti, formerly a highlevel executive of the Italian oil company ENI, used to refer to the attitude of European Union energy officials as affected by ‘petrophobia’.Yet an objective analysis of the use of 1