Written by the leading expert in the history of UK energy, this study provides new, in-depth analysis of the development of UK petroleum policies towards the North Sea oil and gas industry from the early 1960s to the early 1980s. Following on from volume I (The Growing Dominance of the State) to discuss the more recent history of the North Sea oil and gas industry, here Alex Kemp offers new insights into developments in the industry. The controversial decisions to raise gas prices to consumers and to introduce the Gas Levy are discussed, while the thinking behind the gradual reduction in taxation - including the abolition of SPD (Supplementary Petroleum Duty) and the removal of royalties on new developments - is fully explained. The various options considered to reduce the powers of BNOC (British National Oil Corporation), then privatise its upstream assets, and finally to abolish the state company altogether are fully discussed, as is the thinking leading up to the privatisation of the British Gas Corporation in 1986. This volume also sheds light on the development of policies onshore, particularly the role of the OSO (Offshore Supplies Office), and the response of British industry to the North Sea opportunity. Finally, the evolution of policies relating to health, safety, decommissioning, and the environment over the whole period of the study are examined. The Official History of North Sea Oil and Gas will be of interest to students of North Sea oil and gas, energy economics, business history, and British politics, as well as to petroleum professionals and policymakers.

The period from 1957 to 1988 was transformative for the international oil industry. The United Kingdon, home to two major oil companies, British Petroleum (BP) and Shell, as well as the possessor of large quantities of oil and gas in its territorial waters, was at the heart of this transition. While famous for its liberal policy toward oil and gas production, both before and after the discovery of North Sea oil and gas, this period actually saw the United Kingdom respond to shifts in power from the major oil companies to the oil-producing states, many of them in Organization of Petroleum Exporting Companies (OPEC), by building up its competency regarding oil matters. This took the form of efforts to influence the activities of BP and Shell abroad as well as in creation of a state-run oil company, the British National Oil Corporation, in an attempt to exercise greater state control over oil and gas production and distribution. The failure of these efforts was driven in part by internal divisions within Whitehall, the efforts of the oil companies themselves, and ultimately the political will of the Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher to get the state out of the business of oil and gas.

The emergence of the international oil corporation as a political actor in the twentieth century, seen in BP's infrastructure and information arrangements in Iran. In the early twentieth century, international oil corporations emerged as a new kind of political actor. The development of the world oil industry, argues Katayoun Shafiee, was one of the era's largest political projects of techno-economic development. In this book, Shafiee maps the machinery of oil operations in the Anglo-Iranian oil industry between 1901 and 1954, tracking the organizational work involved in moving oil through a variety of technical, legal, scientific, and administrative networks. She shows that, in a series of disagreements, the British-controlled Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (AIOC, which later became BP) relied on various forms of information management to transform political disputes into techno-economic calculation, guaranteeing the company complete control over profits, labor, and production regimes. She argues that the building of alliances and connections that constituted Anglo-Iranian oil's infrastructure reconfigured local politics of oil regions and examines how these arrangements in turn shaped the emergence of both nation-state and transnational oil corporation. Drawing on her extensive archival and field research in Iran, Shafiee investigates the surprising ways in which nature, technology, and politics came together in battles over mineral rights; standardizing petroleum expertise; formulas for calculating profits, production rates, and labor; the “Persianization” of employees; nationalism and oil nationalization; and the long-distance machinery of an international corporation. Her account shows that the politics of oil cannot be understood in isolation from its technical dimensions. The open access edition of this book was made possible by generous funding from Knowledge Unlatched.

Ths book examines the efforts made by the British government of the period to lessen its dependence on American oil supplies, the emergence of Venezuela as the largest single British oil supplier in the early 1930s, and the changing structure of the oil industry both in the US and Europe. It draws almost entirely on primary sources.