At the suggestion of a friend I listened to a recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 series “Costing the Earth”. The programme was entitled “Big Oil, Big Trouble”. After listening to it, I was minded to write a strong letter of complaint and objection to the BBC. However, I then reflected that this would only make my objections known to a few people at the BBC, who would, most likely, immediately dismiss them as coming from a biased source, particularly as, although today I am retired and have no involvement with the industry, I did spend almost all of my working life in it. So I thought it would be better to “go public” with my criticisms and corrections and let people draw their own conclusions – and who better to approach for help on that but the editor of the UK’s best oil and gas news channel, namely Energy Voice. Hence this piece.
Fronted by Tom Heap for the BBC, the thirty minute “Big Oil, Big Trouble” presented a series of opinions from a number of collaborators and also, very sadly for me, it contained a lengthy contribution from Lord John Browne. Although I am loath to give the programme the oxygen of additional listeners, you can, if you wish, listen to it, as I did, on the BBC Radio iPlayer. However, the programme’s message, in a nutshell, is that the major oil companies are acting as “agents of global warming” and leading the world to fail to achieve its carbon reduction targets through a mixture of devices, including spreading misinformation on Climate Science and even worse, by “allowing money to conquer principle” through continuing to explore for and produce oil and gas, whereas, for their own and society’s good, they should now cease all exploration and turn their businesses over predominantly to “new” energy technology such as renewables and hydrogen fuel cells.
It was difficult to know where to start with a criticism of this awful programme and it is indeed tempting to go through it line by line to demonstrate its utter lack of balance and rigour. However, there is not time or space for that, so, instead, I will focus on three very important matters on which the programme was variously misleading or disingenuous.
First, whilst advising that the major oil companies were often portrayed as the “pantomime villains” of the energy scene, the programme did its best to perpetuate that silly image. That is to say, oblivious to the actual facts concerning global oil and gas exploration and production, the programme advanced the fallacious view that oil and gas companies are leading the opposition to the recent Paris Accord on Climate Change by fudging the facts and forcing the world to produce and consume ever more fossil fuels. This analysis is utterly wrong in several respects, all of which could have been easily discerned thorough a small amount of thought and some proper research. The first fallacy is that, somehow, oil companies control demand. Wrong. It is the needs of the consumer, be it private individuals, companies or governments, that give rise to the demand for oil and gas.
The second fallacy is that somehow the major oil companies are in charge of the majority of the world production of oil and gas. Again wholly wrong. It is overwhelmingly governments and state owned oil companies around the world who own and control the process of exploration and production for oil and gas. OPEC for example is an international cartel run by governments in which independent oil companies, big or small, have absolutely no say or control. Indeed it would be fatal under US, UK and European law for them to be involved in any way in that or any other such cartel. In any event the truth is that 75% of global oil production comes from government owned and run companies, whereas each of the so called “major” oil companies has control over a small proportion of the global resource. Exxon, Shell and BP taken together account for only 8% of global production. Even in the UK, where the day to day operations are indeed undertaken by oil companies, it is still the Government which owns all the oil and gas in the ground and controls all oil and gas activity. This the Government does through licensing areas for the companies to operate in, then regulating all their operations and finally taxing the production. To say the oil companies are in charge of global oil and gas production is akin to saying the monkey is in charge of the organ grinder. If the nations of the world really wish to reduce the production of oil and gas in order to limit its consumption, then it is a matter for their governments and politicians, not oilmen. But of course such an admission hardly fits with the “Big Oil as Pantomime Villain” picture which the BBC sought to perpetuate in “Big Oil Big Trouble”.
Second the programme, like many other disingenuous commentators on Climate Change, continually and confusingly referred to “fossil fuels” rather than oil and gas. Oil and gas are of course fossil fuels but so is coal, which is by far the most polluting and dirty of the three. Accordingly, by using the term “fossil fuels” when talking about oil and gas companies, it is possible to ascribe much more environmental damage to them. But the truth is that only a very few oil companies produce any coal at all. Worldwide it is, again, governments and state controlled coal and energy concerns which play the major part on coal production and consumption.
Furthermore, this aggregation of three different fuels under the simple “fossil fuels” banner also hides the fact that one of these fuels, natural gas, if it was used to substitute for coal burn, especially in power stations in countries such as India and China and indeed, rather perversely, Germany, would result in an immediate and dramatic reduction in carbon dioxide emissions in order to give the world time to find a permanent solution to its Global Warming challenge. Is it too much to expect the BBC’s specialist environment unit to be aware and mention any of these “details”?
Third and finally, whilst accepting at the outset that “our lifestyles depend” on oil and gas, the programme advanced the wholly fallacious and dangerous proposition that we can and should immediately cease all exploration for oil and gas with the intend of soon thereafter ceasing production of the stuff. That the BBC can sincerely lend its tacit support to the advancement of such a wholly irresponsible notion I find extremely concerning. Of course one day we will leave the petroleum age and go into a new era of energy technology but that day is not yet with us. It beggars belief that supposedly rational individuals should seriously advance the notion that we can simply cut off the search for and production of oil and gas worldwide. These two fuels are the predominant source of heat and electric power for our homes, factories, schools and offices, besides being the main fuel for all forms of travel by sea, air and land, to say nothing of the tarmac for our roads, the fertilisers for our farms and the petrochemicals and plastics used in very part of our modern society from phones, TVs and computers to a wide range of the essential equipment in our hospitals. The global transition to new technology to substitute for oil and gas will take decades and cost very many trillions of Pounds, Euros and Dollars and the suggestion that this can and should be unnecessarily rushed at now, by simply cutting off the supply of products which are so vital to the maintenance of modern life, is a ludicrously negligent and dangerously misleading proposition. I find this especially so when those advancing it blithely ignore, amongst other things, the role which natural gas could play to substantially reduce carbon emissions if it was used to replace dirty coal burn.
At one level I did find it mildly amusing to hear voices in the programme, who clearly wished the industry ill, giving their supposedly helpful suggestions on how it should adopt its business model in order to survive. I would venture to suggest that oil companies, be they majors, independents or state owned will, quite rightly, pay absolutely no heed such advice. Let us hope so, for, if they do not continue to do seek to fulfil their existing core objective of providing the peoples of the developed and developing world with sufficient supplies of oil and gas for their everyday and vital needs, then we will be in for one of the very bleakest periods in mankind’s history to date.
However, clearly, all of the above points were clearly lost on the researchers and producers of “Big Oil, Big Trouble”. The above is by no means an exhaustive list of the points made on which the “research” was lacking. To give just one example, the producers also seemed to readily accept a view that hydrogen fuel cell could easily solve all our energy production and carbon emissions problems. This conveniently overlooks the fact that hydrogen does not exist in a separate state and first needs to be separated from e.g. water using electricity, the power to generate which has to come from somewhere else. It is also a highly explosive gas, especially in its liquefied form, which makes even petrol seem almost mild in terms of its explosive potential. Hydrogen could have a role to play in decarbonising parts of the energy stream but bringing it into use in our transport systems certainly will not be kid’s play.
None of this is to deny that we should not urgently and constantly seek to progressively reduce polluting emissions and better manage our energy streams. However, this is a very serious and complex matter which will take time to complete. It is most certainly not a process to be trivialised nor a matter about which people should be misinformed by programmes such as “Big Oil, Big Trouble”. People need to be made aware of the true facts, not unfounded theories of biased observers with insufficient rigour and questioning applied to their “research”. Casting the oil companies as pantomime villains, failing to differentiate between the properties of different fossil fuels and their impacts and proffering economically illiterate and factually ignorant “new business models” is certainly not going to help.
Shame upon the BBC for broadcasting such tawdry work and I also very much regret that a fine man like John Browne was used to give this awful little programme an air of credibility. I can only assume he had absolutely no editorial control over the programme nor the use to which his interview was put.
With more than 40 years of experience in the oil industry and a lawyer by profession, Malcolm Webb has extensive senior management experience in both the upstream and downstream oil industry.
He retired as chief executive of trade body Oil and Gas UK (OGUK) last year.
Prior to joining Oil & Gas UK (then called UKOOA) in 2004, Malcolm served as Director General of the UK Petroleum Industry Association for three years. The association is responsible for representing the UK oil refining and marketing sectors.
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