Daniel Yergin

And everybody's very happy.

governments change or times change and people forget the risk that you took to do it.

And they say, we want a different deal.

And that just happens again and again and again.

It happens with all natural resources, with oil, with minerals.

And then it was also, you had, you know, it was the end of colonialism.

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.