Daniel Yergin

Countries becoming independent.

Today, if a company makes a deal with a country to go develop oil, the country gets 80% of the profit.

I mean, obviously you work really hard on government relations, but the countries are generally poor and they say, well, we just want our... It's our resource.

We want our share of it.

So I think over time... Now, what you have as a company then, you had the access to the market, you have the refineries, you have the tankers.

So it isn't like they can just take it over and they don't necessarily also have...

It takes time to train your population to develop your indigenous oil people who can run it.

But if you look back on it, I think you just say there was an inevitability to it, which also had to do with the consolidation of nation states.

You know, I think the governments did, you know, back up.

And I think the British, remember the British owned oil.

a big share of British petroleum, now BP, until the late 1980s.

So, you know, the British government was in there, but then you had the nationalization of what was then called Anglo-Persian, Anglo-Iranian oil, which became BP.

So I think it was inevitable, but I think the governments did try and support, but there were

you know, there were limits that they could do.

I mean, but, you know, the question of access, of maintaining the supplies then and now remains, that question of access remains crucial today.

I mean, you have the U.S.

Navy today trying to push back on the Houthis in Yemen who are attacking oil tankers.

No, I think that was part of your way of trying to embed yourself there, to bring them in so that you were not this isolated island company.

And if you do look at Venezuela and nationalized its company, the oil operations, but by that point they had people who were very well trained at running refineries, at drilling, at finding oil.

And they still carried some of, for quite a number of years, carried some of that DNA with them in their operations until the complete nationalization and Chavez came to power.