by John Browne
8. John Julius Norwich, A History of Venice (London: Allen Lane, 1982), p. 631.
9. Here, again, context is crucial. Pure carbon does not easily combust and it is the carbon-hydrogen bond that is key to the great energy hidden in fossil fuels.
10. An exothermic reaction is one that releases energy from a system, usually in the form of heat.
11. When burnt to produce an equivalent amount of energy, coal produces almost one and a half times as much carbon dioxide as oil and almost twice as much carbon dioxide as natural gas.
12. The Four Great Inventions originated with sinologist and missionary Joseph Edkins. In 1859, he compared the Japanese to the Chinese, writing that ‘they can boast of no remarkable inventions and discoveries, such as printing, paper-making, the mariner’s compass, and the composition of gunpowder’. Joseph Edkins, The Religious Condition of the Chinese (London: Routledge, 1859), p. 2.
13. Joseph Needham, the English scientist, historian and sinologist, proposed his project Science and Civilisation to Cambridge University in 1948 as a single volume. It soon grew to over seven volumes, each of which are composed of multiple parts, spanning the breadth of science and technology throughout Chinese history. It is one of the most astounding works of scholarship of the last century. Needham died in 1995 but his work continues today at the Needham Research Institute in Cambridge, of which I am a Trustee.
14. Joseph Needham & Donald B. Wagner, Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 5, Part 11 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), p. 369.
15. Thomas Malthus, An Essay on the Principle of Population (London: Routledge, 1996, originally published in 1798).
16. Kenneth Pomeranz deals with coal’s role in China’s relative decline in his book The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 65. Differences in the geographical location of coal deposits, the quality of transport links, and factors facilitating the diffusion of knowledge between artisans, entrepreneurs, engineers and scientists, all may have contributed to the fact that an industrial revolution occurred in Europe and not China. Pomeranz claims that ‘while overall skills, resource, and economic conditions in “China”, taken as an abstract whole, may not have been much less conducive to a coal/steam revolution than those in “Europe” as a whole, the distribution of those endowments made the chances of such a revolution much dimmer.’
17. William Blake famously wrote of England’s ‘dark Satanic Mills’ in his epic poem Milton. Blake was a seminal figure in the Romantic movement which reacted against the Industrial Revolution by idealising nature.
18. Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland (New York: Anchor Books, 1968, edited by J. P. Meyer, originally published in 1835), p. 96.
19. Asa Briggs, the English historian, Victorian Cities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). P. 317.
20. In 1845, Friedrich Engels published a damning study on the harmful effects of the Industrial Revolution in The Condition of the Working Class in England based on his experience of living in Manchester between 1842 and 1844.
21. The Select Committee on Accidents in Mines of 1835 estimated just over 2,000 mining deaths for the preceding twenty-five years, although incomplete records likely make the reality far higher.
22. Choke damp (carbon dioxide) and white damp (carbon monoxide) suffocated workers, while fire damp (methane) caused explosions.
23. An 1842 Report by a Parliamentary Royal Commission on the employment of women and children in mines led to the Mines and Collieries Bill in the same year.
24. In 1698, Thomas Savery patented an ‘atmospheric pump’ that could raise water to a height of several metres. By injecting steam into a chamber and then cooling it with a jet of cold water a partial vacuum was created that forced water upwards. The pressure was too low to be of much use for mining, but in 1712 Thomas Newcomen invented a more advanced first steam pump based on the same idea. Newcomen’s pump used vacuum pressure to draw a piston attached to a rocker. This could then be attached to a series of pumps to draw water from a much greater height. Newcomen’s engine could also be used to haul coal up the mineshaft. Humphry Davy’s innovation was to use a fine mesh in his lamp to stop any flame propagating outside that could cause explosions.
25. Town gas is produced from coal when heated with steam and oxygen, breaking down into a noxious mix of methane, hydrogen, carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
26. The Gang of Four were a radical political faction of the Chinese Communist Party. The Gang was led by Jiang Qing, Mao Zedong’s wife, and also consisted of Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hingwen. After Mao’s death they lost their power and went into hiding. BP’s office and base during one early exploration project in the 1970s was a mock Tudor mansion in Shanghai, known as the Red House; it was rumoured to have been used by the Gang of Four as a bolthole shortly before they were arrested. Following their arrest, the Gang was blamed for the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution and received sentences ranging from death (later commuted to life in prison) to twenty years in prison. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 179–80.
27. The full extent of Beijing’s pollution is more often seen during the winter and spring because of the greater frequency of inversion layers. Normally air temperature decreases with increasing altitude, but during an inversion a warm layer of air above the ground traps cold air below, causing pollutants to build up. China’s smogs are reminiscent of those that plagued London through much of the twentieth century. The ‘Big Smoke’ of 1952 was London’s worst ever example of pollution by smog. Weather conditions trapped emissions from London’s numerous coal power stations and coal-burning stoves in homes across the city – the particularly cold December weather leading families to burn much more coal than usual. The thick ‘pea soup’ smog reduced visibility to only eleven inches, causing trains and buses to crash. It is estimated that as many as 12,000 people may have died by inhaling the toxic air of that London winter.
28. The reality could be far higher: many mining accidents are covered up by local officials for fear of being held accountable by the ruling Communist Party or the exposure of their own illicit ties to companies involved.
29. China’s increasing dependence on coal has caused the carbon dioxide it produces per unit of energy to rise in recent decades, while in most other nations it has decreased.
30. BBC News, ‘China pollution “threatens growth”, 28 February 2011. www.bbc.co.uk
31. In June 2011 I heard Premier Wen Jiabao, originally a geologist, speak at the Royal Society in London where he was being awarded the King Charles II Medal. In his speech he outlined the important role that science and technology would play in this transition. ‘The Path to China’s Future’, 27 June 2011, Royal Society, London.
32. Allan Nevins, the American historian, Ford: The Times the Man, the Company (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954), p. 48.
33. Henry Ford, My Life and Work (London: William Heinemann, 1922), p. 22.
34. Nevins, Ford: The Times the Man, the Company, p. 54.
35. Ibid., p. 17.
36. Ibid., p. 1.
37. Oil not only powered the new mode of transportation, but was integral to the roads on which automobiles travelled. Asphalt, made from the largest hydrocarbon molecules in crude oil, is used to pave roads with a smooth surface.
38. The high output from Ford’s factory enabled him to reduce the price of the Model T to only $500 in 1913, around $12,000 today.
39. Petroleum is coined from Greek the words for rock (petros) and oil (elaion). The term petroleum first appears in Agricola’s earlier work of 1546, De Natura Fossilium (New York: Geological Society of America, 1955. Translated from the first Latin edition of 1546 by Mark Chance Bandy and Jean A. Bandy), p. 61.
40. The British Library hold a first edition of De re metallica, previously owned by Prince Henry, the son of King James I. The margins are scrawled with annotations, Prince Henry clearly taki
ng an active interest in the workings of the mining industry.
41. Agricola, De re metallica, p. 583.
42. An account of the technological specifics of oil production can be found in Thomas C. Frick Petroleum Production Handbook (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962).
43. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 152–75.
44. The extraction of oil and gas is in general more costly than the extraction of coal, for three reasons. First, the extraction of previously unreachable reserves of oil and gas requires the development of new and more complex facilities which have to operate in increasingly inhospitable environments. In contrast, while coal mining technology has seen many advances, the basic principles remain the same. Second, the nature of the two extraction techniques is fundamentally different. Oil and gas can only begin to be extracted once a large initial investment has been completed. This raises the risk associated with a project and the cost of capital, as do the many failed exploration attempts prior to a successful find. Coal mining is incremental, though, and costs are more closely correlated with the rate of extraction. Third, gases and liquids require greater resources to transport and store than solids such as coal.
45. In 1856, Darcy published a relationship for the flow rate of water in sand filters in Les Fontaines Publiques de la Ville de Dijon, a report on the construction of the Dijon, France, municipal water system. He determined that the rate of flow of the fluid was proportional to pressure drop in the system, the cross-sectional area that the flow moves through and permeability of the medium. The rate of flow is also inversely proportional to the viscosity of the medium.
46. The injection of water and gas into a well is often referred to as improved oil recovery (IOR), rather than enhanced oil recovery. EOR and IOR were traditionally regarded as sequentially implemented secondary and tertiary processes after natural recovery has stopped (the primary process). Such a distinction is no longer made; often all artificial recovery processes are considered and partially implemented from the beginning of production from a well.
47. Heat is also used to extract oil from shale formations. Some shales would have produced oil and gas if they had been buried for long enough at high enough temperatures and pressures. These processes normally take millions of years, but can be accelerated by heating. Liquid oil from shale rock has been commercially produced in this way since the 1800s (and shale has been burnt as a solid fuel since prehistoric times), but it was always extracted as shale and then processed. Confusingly, there are other shales that will flow oil if they are fractured. This is the source of significant production in the USA.
48. In 1896, John J. McLauren wrote: ‘A flame or a spark would not explode Nitro-Glycerin readily, but the chap who struck it a hard rap might as well avoid trouble among his heirs by having had his will written and a cigar-box ordered to hold such fragments as his weeping relatives could pick from the surrounding district,’ Sketches in Crude Oil – Some Accidents and Incidents of the Petroleum Development in all parts of the Globe (1896).
49. M. K. Hubbert, ‘Nuclear energy and the Fossil Fuels’, Drilling and Production Practice, American Petroleum Institute (1956).
50. Thomas Friedman, Hot Flat and Crowded (London: Allen Lane, 2008), p. 250.
51. Only a year before, an explosion on board the Odyssey on the opposite coast of Canada had resulted in 132,000 tonnes of oil being released into the sea. Fortunately, much of this had been carried away from the coastline, reducing the environmental impact.
52. I discuss the Texas City disaster in detail in Beyond Business, pp. 203–6.
53. J. D. Rockefeller quoted in Daniel Yergin’s Pulitzer prize-winning history of the oil industry, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil Money and Power (New York: Free Press, 2009, originally published in 1991), p. 26.
54. Ibid., p. 81.
55. The fragments of Standard Oil still exist as well-known international oil companies today. The largest company formed, Standard Oil of New Jersey, making up almost half the total value of Standard Oil, is known today as Exxon. Standard Oil of New York later became Mobil; Standard Oil of California became Chevron; Standard Oil of Ohio became Sohio, later absorbed by BP; Standard Oil of Indiana became Amoco, which later merged with BP; Continental Oil became Conoco; Atlantic became part of ARCO and then BP.
56. Yergin, The Prize, p. 89.
57. Ida Tarbell, ‘Character Study Part One’, published in McClure’s Magazine, July 1905.
58. On 29 September 1916, the New York Times reported on its front page that Standard Oil’s booming stocks ‘makes its head a billionaire’. Rockefeller’s personal wealth dramatically increased from $300 million to just short of a billion when Standard Oil Trust was broken up. The shares he held in each of the resultant companies rocketed when trading opened on 1 December 1911, and continued to appreciate until they passed the billion dollar mark. When wealth is measured as a percentage of the economy, Rockefeller remains the wealthiest American ever to have lived.
59. Ron Chernow, Titan (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 314.
60. Ibid.
61. In the notorious ‘loans for shares’ scheme, Russia’s oligarchs obtained many of the struggling state’s assets for what was thought to be significantly less than their true value. See also note 64.
62. In 2010, Russian oligarch and philanthropist Vladimir Potanin announced that he would give away all his fortune to good causes, rather than to his children. ‘From oligarchy to philanthropy, Financial Times, 8 May 2011. www.ft.com
63. Potanin came from a well-off Soviet family and so was different from the other Russian oligarchs, many of whom were from poor Jewish backgrounds. Before his involvement in the loans-for-shares schemes he had been a Soviet official and then a banker.
64. This period of history is documented by Chrystia Freeland in Sale of the Century (London: Abacus, 2005). A recent trial between oligarchs Abramovich and Berezovsky has once again opened up this wild period of Russia history, detailing their extravagant lives and even details of a secretive payment by Abramovich for the release of two British hostages. Berezovsky sought to sue Abramovich for $5 billion, claiming that he was ‘intimidated’ into selling his shares in Russian oil giant Sibneft at a fraction of their value. Berezovsky managed to get the trial to be played out in London because he believed the law would be selectively applied against him in Russia. In the end, Berezovsky was unsuccessful: he lost the case.
65. In The Prize, Yergin writes: ‘As the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, they looked to government to restore competition, control the abuses, and tame the economic and political power of the trusts, those vast and fearsome dragons that roam so freely across the country. And the fiercest and most feared of all the dragons was Standard Oil’, (pp. 80–81).
66. The Seven Sisters were: Jersey (Exxon), Socony-Vacuum (Mobil), Standard of California (Chevron) and Texaco (the four Aramco partners) and then also Gulf, Royal Dutch/Shell and British Petroleum.
67. Although OPEC nations still produce about 40 per cent of the world’s oil (and about 60 per cent of that traded internationally), as with any large and diverse group of nations, divisions and rivalry remain, and agreeing to production quotas works much better in theory than in practice. For example, Saudi Arabia, a member of OPEC, has a strong alliance with the US. Moreover, as global demand for oil surges, many oil-producing nations are struggling to keep up, leaving little spare capacity with which to control prices. Saudi Arabia has recently been the only nation with spare physical capacity to increase the amount of oil produced (potentially to lower prices). Coordinated cutbacks in production (potentially to increase prices) require significant cooperation.
68. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 24––42.
69. Alyeska Pipeline Service Company, http://www.alyeska-pipe.com
70. BP had been kicked out of Kuwait when the government took complete control of the Kuwait Oil Company, part owned by BP, in 1975.
71. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 58–75.
72. Carlos
Andrés Pérez first came to power in 1974. Two years later he formed PDVSA during the wave of resource nationalisation of the 1970s. Oil prices were high and many developing countries were taking the opportunity to use their oil wealth to accelerate development. But in the 1980s, when oil prices fell, so did state revenues. Pérez lost the 1979 presidential elections and spent the 1980s travelling the world, learning about the resource curse and alternative modes of economic growth. Returning as President in 1993, he sought to implement his new understanding of oil economics.
73. Browne, Beyond Business, p. 125.
74. David Ricardo. On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (London: John Murray, 1821. Originally published in 1817).
75. Yergin, The Prize, p. 120.
76. Algeria is a case a point. By leaving some business for the international oil companies to do, however small but with a promise that it might change in the future, they kept expertise in the country.
77. ‘The devil’s excrement’, The Economist, 22 May 2003. www.economist.com
78. Yergin, The Prize, p. xv.
79. Thomas Friedman writes that, according to the first law of petropolitics, ‘the higher the average global crude oil price rises, the more free speech, free press, free and fair elections, an independent judiciary, the rule of law, and independent political parties are eroded’. With high oil prices, there is no need for citizens to pay the government taxes, but as a consequence the government becomes less accountable to its citizens. Oil wealth is then used for populist spending, relieving the pressure for democratic change, but is also spent on more forceful oppression, such as extra policing and intelligence services. ‘The first law of petropolitics’, Foreign Policy, 15 April 2006.
80. Browne, Beyond Business, pp. 110–19.
81. Diamonds are formed deep in the earth’s mantle where high pressures and temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Celsius force together small grains of pure carbon into a regular, almost unbreakable, lattice structure.
82. A Rough Trade (London: Global Witness, 1998).