Black gold is much in evidence at the docks of Europe’s offshore capital. Telly Savalas, Looks at Aberdeen, film short
We will see oil wars. Everything will change as a consequence. Richard Heinberg, author The Oil Depletion Protocol, interview Oil, Smoke & Mirrors
We are absolutely totally dependent on oil for all our activities. Michael Meacher MP
The energy that fuels modern society is oil. And that too is running out. Every barrel of crude oil is getting harder and more expensive to find. Vast swathes of Canadian wilderness are being scraped away to access one of the planet’s last great oil reserves. But extracting raw fuel from oil-soaked tar sands requires intensive amounts of energy and water. Two things that are already in short supply. Doomsday, 2010
The main obstacles to investigate Islamic terrorism were US oil corporate interests. John O’Neill, FBI
It is a sequential war to control the last remaining oil reserves on the planet. Mike Ruppert, lecturer & author & former CIA agent
The best data now shows that planet Earth passed that point [Peak Oil] somewhere in late 2005. Mike Ruppert, interview War of the Words
Forty years ago Britain was on the brink of an extraordinary discovery which it seemed would change the country’s fortunes for ever: oil. Billions of gallons of it. Deep beneath the North Sea. Promising to kick-start our ailing post-war economy. Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 1/3, BBC 2009
In August 1959 the world’s biggest gas field was discovered across the North Sea in Holland. Geologists started getting excited. If the same rock formation continued under the North Sea, we could be looking at a fabulously wealthy future. ibid.
Britain’s newest industry had an aura of glamour. It even had its own TV series: Mogul. ibid.
Sea-Gem was about to become the first rig to strike gas ... Boxing Day 1965 they started to jack up the rig ready for the move: under the strain two of the steel legs shattered, plunging the platform and its crew into the sea ... 13 of the Sea-Gem’s 39 crew died in the disaster. ibid.
Contrary to popular belief the oil and gas don’t sit in great underground caverns. They seep between the particles of rock. Reservoirs are formed if a layer of harder rock above then traps the oil. ibid.
The waters they’d be working in were twice as deep as any that had been drilled in before. The weather was often violent and always unpredictable. ibid.
The engineering marvels were a magnificent industrial achievement on a scale unrivalled since the building of the railways. ibid.
Ted Heath’s Conservative government fell. Harold Wilson, the incoming Labour leader, appointed Tony Benn as minister for energy. He quickly realised the taxes on oil could bring the government a cash windfall. ibid.
The deal was they [oil companies] wouldn’t pay tax until they’d covered their costs. The Labour government wasn’t expecting any revenue from North Sea oil until 1980. ibid.
Britain was on the brink of self-sufficiency in oil. And a new chapter in the country’s history was about to begin. Fifteen years since it began, the North Sea oil industry now boasts twenty platforms and a workforce of over 20,000 in the remotest workplace in Britain. Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 2/3
The oil companies were anti-union, and anyone involved in union activity could find themselves on a one-way ticket home ... But some oil workers were starting to want their own union. ibid.
110 miles off the coast of Aberdeen, Piper Alpha was a giant industrial complex with sleeping quarters, a restaurant and gymnasium. It was the hub for a network of platforms ... But 6th July 1988 was different. It started when a gas ... pump exploded ... The fire stopped men reaching the life-boats ... Of the 226 men aboard Piper Alpha only 62 survived. ibid.
But OILC never achieved across-the-board union recognition. The cost of the industrial action was high, around 1,000 contract workers were sacked and blacklisted. The strikes cost the operations £200,000,000. ibid.
On 16th September 1992 John Major faced meltdown in the City. A massive devaluation of the pound exposed the fragility of our economy. The country plunged into recession. The price of oil crashed. Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 3/3
In January 1993 the Oil Tanker Braer carrying 10,000 barrels of Norwegian North Sea Oil to Canada lost its engines in bad weather. It ran aground on the coast of Shetland. The oil spill covered twenty square kilometres of sea. ibid.
It was contaminated with tons of toxic sludge. This was the first big test for any oil company of how to deal with redundant equipment. What happened to the Brent Spar set the standard for the rest of the North Sea industry. ibid.
But Shell’s engineering solution failed to reckon with one vital factor: when the environmental campaign group Greenpeace got wind of the dumping plan, they were alarmed at the precedent this would set. They chartered a ship to go out into the North Sea. ibid.
Greenpeace set up camp on the deserted Spar and started broadcasting their environmental message ... Greenpeace made sure pictures of their eviction were broadcast around the world. ibid.
The Oil industry was worried. If decommissioning was going to be this difficult, they’d all be in trouble. In June 1995 barges were sent to the Brent Spar to tow it 200 miles into the Atlantic. Greenpeace did their best to stop them. But the Shell team went ahead and began the three-day journey to the dumping site ... The barges towing Brent Spar were making a U-turn. On June 20th 1995 just a few miles from their objective Shell decided to back down. Greenpeace had won the campaign. It was an astonishing victory for the protesters. Shell were forced to tow the Brent Spar to a fiord in Norway. ibid.
After seven years and forty million pounds the Brent Spar was finally cut up: it became part of a ferry terminal. ibid.
There was a growing gap between what we consumed and what we produced. In the year 2000 production from the North Sea started to slow down. And the price of oil started to rise. ibid.
In March 2003 American and British forces invaded Iraq. Iraq had some of the biggest oil fields in the world. With global oil reserves diminishing, many believe this war was an attempt to gain control over it. ibid.
The oil industry is going to face a big bill for decommissioning over the coming years. And we’re all going to feel the impact. ibid.
The lights were going out all over Britain. The oil crisis just added fuel to the coal crisis and gave us the three-day-week. News report, cited Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil
But profits as big as this – £13.1 billion – still throw up all sorts of questions. Are oil companies making too much? Should they pay even more tax? News report, cited Crude Britannia: The Story of North Sea Oil 3/3
The United States intervened secretly in 1973 when OPEC was evaluating this proposal, and said please don’t do that. And they were talking to Saudi Arabia, the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, why don’t you sell these in dollars only? And they worked closely with the British on this. And we will sort of a quid pro quo – we’ll protect you, we’ll sell you military arms, we’ll keep you in power, as long as you keep selling oil in dollars. William Clark, author Petrodollar Warfare
If we had to play by the normal economic rules, we would have a normal sized military, not a massive global military which is larger than the next twenty nations combined, which is what we have right now. So if the dollar loses its status as the world reserve currency, that is the pillar that underpins American supremacy, then the military pillar, which is the other pillar of American supremacy, will fall away as well. ibid.
The general’s power is backed by foreign money. One estimate is that since it crushed democracy in 1990 the Burmese regime has drawn 65% of its financial support from oil companies. The main backers are the French company Total and its American partner Unical. The oil pipeline they are building in the south of Burma will allow the generals to sell the country’s natural gas to Thailand. The deal will give them an estimated $400,000,000 a year over 30 years. John Pilger, Burma - Land of Fear, ITV 1996
Of course it’s madness to have vast profits from oil on the one hand, and starving people who can’t afford food, let alone oil, on the other. But that’s capitalism. That’s the ‘right’ of people to do what they like with their own property. And of course the people who are making those surpluses (and it includes shareholders in oil companies as well as the sheikhs and their hangers-on in Arabia) want their ill-gotten gains to ‘grow’ just as fast as possible. So the ‘surpluses’ chase themselves round the world money markets looking for the highest interest rates, and the world’s poor people have to pay yet again in higher prices to keep the ‘surpluses’ growing.
As long as the people of the world pay service to the claimed ‘right’ of the propertied few to use their profits as they wish, the ‘recycling of oil surpluses’ to benefit the world’s poor stands not a snowball’s chance in hell. Paul Foot, Three Letters to a Bennite, 1981