Episode 2 Planet Oil: The Treasure That Conquered the World

On 5th December, 1952, Londoners woke up

to a thick, toxic smog that had blanketed the city.

By mid morning, all rail, road and air links were in a state of chaos.

Reports of muggings and shop looting spiked as crime took hold.

By the evening, people were choking to death in the streets.

London was effectively in total shutdown for four days.

By the time the fog eventually cleared, over 4,000 people

were dead and hundreds of thousands more had been hospitalised.

The cause of the catastrophe was this.

Coal. In the winter of 1952, for the first time in years,

we were burning astronomical amounts of the stuff.

So much so that it created a choking fog that consumed the entire city.

It was a tragic event repeated across the UK,

from Manchester to Glasgow.

And to make matters worse,

Britain had also run out of oil.

Our society was addicted to the stuff, but had none of its own.

As a result, we were totally dependent on foreign lands to

get the supplies we desperately needed.

So when, in 1951, a man that nobody here had ever heard of

suddenly stopped our oil flowing, Britain was brought to its knees,

crippled and held to ransom by foreign oil.

It was our first energy crisis...

..and the beginning of the most dangerous chapter

in the story of Planet Oil.

An era that would see the rise of a new superpower

that would come to control almost all of the world's oil.

A time when those with it ruled supreme.

The era of a very cheap source of energy is gone

and this is a new era.

Whilst those without realised

just what they would have to do to get it.

It's a how-to guide to overthrowing a government.

It was the time when oil transformed from the most sought-after

commodity on the planet to a dirty political weapon.

Geology was about to get dangerous.

This is the United Arab Emirates in the Middle East.

It's one of the driest, most barren regions in the world.

A land scorched by 40-degree temperatures,

where even survival is a challenge.

Yet dotted around this region there are signs of life,

towering monuments that have emerged from the desert in the last

75 years or so as a result of a natural resource

that's more abundant here than anywhere else in the world.

Oil.

Sprawling cities like Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, or here in Dubai, have

literally grown out of this entire region's incredible oil wealth.

Collectively, the Middle East nations are the biggest

producers of crude on the planet,

pumping out around 65% of global supplies.

It's incredible to think that, 75 years or so ago,

this region was desert.

Cities like this certainly just didn't exist.

It's an astounding transformation. But what drove it?

The answer to that question is found in the meteoric rise

of the Middle East's most powerful oil nation,

a place that has become the undisputed king of crude.

Saudi Arabia.

And that story begins back in the 1930s,

with the exploits of a rather eccentric Brit.

This might look like an Arabian prince,

but in fact he's a very English gentleman.

His name was Jack Philby

and he'd been a key diplomatic figure in Britain's pursuit of oil

in the Middle East throughout the early 20th century.

But in 1925, he abruptly resigned

after accusations of sexual misconduct and espionage.

Instead of returning to Britain, he settled in Saudi Arabia where,

as a man well rehearsed in Arabic custom and tradition,

he'd made many powerful and influential friends.

And one stood out above them all.

King Ibn Saud, the nation's ruling monarch.

It was a relationship that was about to change Planet Oil forever.

In 1931, during an automobile trip into the desert

in search of water reserves, King Ibn Saud confided in Philby

about the perilous economic state of his country.

Bitter tribal struggles had left the nation divided and bankrupt.

So poor, in fact, that the king

carried his entire treasury around in a saddle bag.

"Have you ever thought of getting into oil production?"

Philby enquired. "Oh, Philby," Saud replied,

"if someone was to give me one million dollars,

"I would give them all the concessions in the world."

That casual exchange gave Philby the germ of an idea -

an idea that would mark the beginning of Saudi's age of oil.

Philby knew that the British Government were desperate to

exploit any part of the Middle East they could...

..and that gifting them another new territory at a knock-down price

could prove the biggest prize in history.

But he also knew that there were others

just as interested in Saudi's oil potential.

There's lots of speculation as to why Philby did what he did.

Some say that he bore a grudge against all the charges

of espionage and sexual misconduct that were levelled against him.

But others say that, you know,

he just wanted the best deal for the Saudi king and his country.

But whatever the reason, one thing's for certain -

Britain's man in Saudi was about to stitch his old country up.

Philby deliberately led the British to the negotiation table

whilst all the while also holding secret talks with another party -

American oil giant Standard.

It would turn out to be a fateful double-cross.

In April 1933, the Saudi finance minister,

Abdullah al-Sulaiman, sat down with a Standard Oil exec

and signed away the rights to explore the country's oil potential.

And all for a payment of just 275,000.

Standard ultimately agreed to change their name

to the Arabian American Oil Company, or ARAMCO.

And for the next five years, they drilled the barren

deserts of the Saudi kingdom in search of the black stuff.

But what made them think they would ever find anything?

At first glance, this doesn't seem

a very sensible place to look for fossil fuels.

After all, oil is cooked up from marine plankton and oceanic sediment

and, well, there's not a whole lot of that in this desert expanse.

But of course, this is the Middle East of today.

Go back 100 million years or so

and you find a very different environment.

To find out more about how this now barren landscape was once

a very different place,

I'm heading into the desert with palaeontologist Stephen Erenberg.

We're hoping to uncover evidence not of desert,

but rather a massive oceanic oil factory.

And the clues that reveal that?

Seashells.

So, as you look around, you see fragments all over the place,

-really - different types of shells.

-Wow.

Some of them are quite big. Here's an example. You can see

a little better if I dump the water on it.

It really brings it out, doesn't it? That's quite a big one, there.

So this might be an extinct type of oyster, got very big in the

Cretaceous time, 70 million years ago, when this was deposited.

See, I think a lot of people would find that surprising.

Here we are, middle of the desert, and we're finding seashells.

-Marine organisms living here.

-Well, this entire area -

actually, most of Arabia -

was covered by shallow ocean water, part of the Tethys Ocean.

This Tethys seaway was very important for the eventual

formation of the oil deposits in the Middle East.

There were periods when lots of marine organisms

accumulated in the deeper parts of these shallow basins

and formed organic-rich rocks that could later be buried

to expel their organic content as oil.

So it might look mundane to the passer-by, but this is actually

one of the most economically valuable rocks in the Middle East.

Oh, yeah, they're essential.

Shells and more shells.

These conditions found in the Tethys Ocean

created the perfect storm in geological terms...

..one that produced huge reservoirs of crude oil.

More than anywhere else on the planet.

And millions of years later,

when that sea had become Saudi Arabian desert, American oilmen

drilled holes across it, hoping to tap that massive potential.

And they did.

ARAMCO struck oil at a site called Dammam No. 7,

in eastern Saudi on March 4th 1938.

But whilst most oil wells usually levelled out after just a few days,

this one just got bigger.

Saudi Arabia had entered the oil age with a bang.

And Dammam turned out to be just the tip of the iceberg.

More wells were tapped throughout the '30s and '40s

and by the end of the Second World War, it was clear that the

reserves here were unlike anything else found before.

Saudi Arabia was sitting on an ocean of crude.

And with oil having become the most sought-after

commodity in the post-war world, it wasn't long before this new

bonanza attracted the attention of Planet Oil's biggest users.

Both President Roosevelt and Winston Churchill emerged victorious

from World War II with their sights firmly set on the Middle East.

They knew just how crucial oil was becoming in the modern world.

And with Saudi Arabia now the biggest prize of them all,

they both wanted it for themselves.

In a shamelessly transparent act, both Roosevelt and Churchill

wooed King Ibn Saud, making personal visits and showering him with gifts.

Churchill's approach was uncharacteristically crass

for an English gentleman.

After the cultural faux pas of offering a teetotal Muslim ruler

cigars and alcohol, he arranged to ship to the Saudi king

a one-off gold-plated Rolls-Royce.

A regal gift for a regal cause.

Roosevelt, on the other hand, tugged at the heart, not the wallet.

He'd done his homework, studying both the man and his culture.

He travelled great distances to see the king

despite his deteriorating health

and showered him not with expensive gifts,

but poignant ones...

..such as the donation of his own wheelchair,

from one polio sufferer to another.

Roosevelt knew just how important Saudi Arabia was going to be -

not just in terms of oil wealth, but in terms of America's entire future.

This wasn't a time for extravagant gifts or gestures,

this was about winning hearts and minds. Roosevelt called it right.

The US would win big,

cementing a political alliance that guaranteed all Saudi oil would

now be produced by American companies.

Britain had just been shut out of the biggest oil deal of the century,

whilst the US government had secured its energy future

with an endless flow of crude.

And boy, did the oil keep flowing.

By the 1940s,

billion-dollar oil pipeline projects were pumping

millions of barrels of crude across continents to Western consumers who

were using it for everything from cars to the latest wonder product...

plastic.

Animal, vegetable or mineral?

Maybe this little thimble belongs to a kingdom all of its own,

the kingdom of plastics.

Geology had never been more valuable.

And with US politicians and private oil companies controlling it all,

they had made sure that they would all be in the black for generations.

But as the West revelled in this new oil nirvana,

the political tide in the Middle East was changing.

The oil free-for-all might have given Britain and the US

energy security, but the boom had not gone unnoticed by their hosts.

One morning in 1950,

the Saudi Arabian finance minister sat down to read the paper.

He came upon an article celebrating ARAMCO's triumphant oil

finds in his country, a success he knew all too well,

since this was Abdullah Suleiman, the very man who had signed

Saudi's original oil deal with the US 20 years earlier.

But it wasn't celebration that was in Suleiman's thoughts that day

but rather some jaw-dropping facts that the article revealed.

Suleiman noted that the profits received by the Saudi

government had gone up from five million in 1932

to over 50 million by 1950.

Good news? Not as far as he was concerned.

If that was the increase of his nation's slice of the profits,

how much was the company making?

Suleiman decided to dig a little deeper,

and what he discovered shocked him.

In the years between 1944 and '49, profits had increased forty-fold.

But the Saudis were guaranteed only a tiny percentage of that wealth...

..all very well when there was no oil, but now it was flowing

so freely, Suleiman wasn't quite so happy.

In fact, ARAMCO were paying more in taxes to the US treasury

than they were in profits to the Saudi government.

Suleiman's country was being ripped off.

That realisation would spark a seismic

shift in the ownership of the Middle East's oil wealth.

And Saudi Arabia's energy minister was the first to make his move.

Suleiman first asked for, then demanded,

a change to the concession that he'd signed in 1932.

Saudi Arabia wanted a new trade deal,

an equal 50% share in their own oil profits.

ARAMCO didn't like the idea at all, but the execs knew

that if they wanted to keep the oil flowing, they'd have to accept it.

This was the new future.

In December 1950, a new 50-50 agreement was

reached between ARAMCO and the Saudi government.

The age of private companies ruling over the world's crude

was coming to an end.

Now the nations that held the oil

demanded greater ownership of their own resource.

And anyone who wanted it had no choice

but to bow to the new terms of trade.

You know, it's hard to overstate just what a seismic shift in global

oil relations this was.

Suddenly "50-50 deals" was the buzz word that reverberated

round boardrooms throughout the Arab world.

Middle Eastern countries were on the rise,

a rise that was rooted in those perfect geological conditions

that just happened to lie underneath them.

With countries throughout the region

quickly following in Suleiman's footsteps, it wasn't long

before attention turned to Iran and Britain's oil interests.

Anglo-Persian Oil - or BP, as it's better known today -

had controlled the Iranian oilfields since the early

20th century, but unlike others, they were no ordinary oil company.

Thanks to Winston Churchill, they'd been majority owned

by the British government since 1914.

And as far as they were concerned, the idea of handing 50% of

the oil profits back to the Iranian government was not even an option.

But that blind obstinance was about to haunt them.

In March 1951,

the Iranian Prime Minister, Haj Ali Razmara, was assassinated amidst

an air of increasing civil unrest in the country.

Razmara had been supportive of Britain's colonial

control of Iranian oil reserves.

And as revolution brewed, he paid the ultimate price for it.

In his place, the ruling Shah of Iran appointed Mohammad Mossadegh,

a very different kind of leader.

It had been just months

since Saudi Arabia's new 50-50 oil deal had been agreed...

..and Mossadegh had watched it all unfold with interest.

Now he was ready to make his move.

I'm meeting Mossadegh biographer Roxane Farmanfarmaian to find out

more about how this man was about to transform Britain's oil future.

What was the relationship at that time like with the Iranian

oil company and with the British?

It was very contentious.

There was a clear sense that the value of the oil was

being lost to the British, there was very little that was actually

being sent back to Iran.

And that was the beginning, if you will, of

this whole nationalisation project that Mossadegh began, because

he simply felt that Iran deserved the right to its own resources.

So how did the change happen where Mossadegh comes in

and transforms that whole landscape?

It was building up. There was a real break

in the ability of British negotiators to see that the Iranian

situation was beginning to reach a crisis point.

It was not clear perhaps to those in Whitehall that this was truly

something they were going to lose.

There still was this sense that

this contract could be negotiated - after all, there was still a lot

of opportunity, it was just that the Iranians were being very pig-headed.

Almost immediately at the outset we were asked

to accept the Persian law as it stands.

I replied that we could not do that.

Mossadegh finally determines that there isn't going to be a deal.

The government is an extremist government,

and it will not admit anything but a full surrender of all our rights.

So the whole mantra started being "nationalisation, nationalisation".

Britain's refusal to share Iran's oil equally with the country's

new political leader was a disastrous misjudgment.

In the spring of 1951, Mossadegh seized control

of all his country's oilfields and sent the British workers packing.

The UK was completely frozen out of her only oil supply.

Ever since the birth of the oil age, Britain's been

worried about its energy security.

All that political pondering, though, can be traced back

to the day that Mossadegh took away Britain's oil.

Nobody had ever done that before, and it made us

realise just how exposed we were.

In 1951, without oil, Britain was in serious

trouble, an energy orphan for the first time in its history.

The country quickly ground to a halt.

Economic output was crippled and unemployment spiked.

Even grand events, like the Festival of Britain,

which tried to lift spirits by showcasing a modern UK,

served only to highlight the problem further...

..for the very things it promised, like new central heating in every

home or a gadget-filled future, were all made from oil.

Britain simply had to get its Iranian oil flowing again.

But nobody was in the mood for another war,

and a bankrupt UK government certainly couldn't afford one.

The only way back was through diplomacy,

and the newly formed United Nations was the place to do it.

For the British, it was an open-and-shut case.

They had invested millions in establishing the oilfields of Iran

and nobody had the right to illegally take them away.

Unfortunately for the Brits, the UN didn't quite see it that way.

The US sat on the fence, anxious not to

jeopardise their interests in Saudi Arabia.

Meanwhile, Mohammad Mossadegh rolled into town and denounced the British

as a gang of thieves draining his country of its mineral wealth.

To be honest, many of the delegates thought he had a point.

The political tide amongst the oil-rich nations of the Middle East

was on the turn.

Britain's diplomatic offensive was doomed from the start.

Mossadegh was going to keep his oil.

And that deadlock simply meant continued fuel poverty for the UK...

..and a disastrous attempt to keep the country moving at any cost.

Oil had been used as a political weapon for the first time.

And what a punch it packed.

But a modern society without oil was simply not an option.

The only way Britain was going to get it back was to fight for it.

And for that, they needed help.

I'm in Washington to find out about Britain's next move...

..an event that was to become a landmark moment

in the Planet Oil story.

It was called Operation Ajax, and the plan was simple.

It was to overthrow the Iranian Prime Minister

and put in his place a new man,

one hand-picked by the US and the UK,

a man who'd be sympathetic to Britain's predicament -

basically, someone who would give them their oil back.

And this was the guy, a military general called Fazlollah Zahedi.

This was going to be the world's first

coup d'etat in the name of oil.

I've been invited to take a rare look at some top-secret

documents, declassified just last year, that provide

a fascinating insight into how this coup would be played out.

So, what are these documents? It's got "clandestine service history".

Overthrow of Premier Mossadeq of Iran.

It's just a fascinating account.

It's a "how to" guide to overthrowing a government.

So, who was pushing it? Who was the main architect?

Well, it occurred on different levels.

They have right here

the director of CIA approves the operational plan on 11th July '53.

So is that the UK Foreign Secretary?

That's the UK, the director of SIS, which is MI6,

the British Prime Minister, Churchill, on 1st July

and President Eisenhower on 11th July.

-So, no ducking responsibility there!

-That's extraordinary.

I mean, that seems like a really big deal,

the leaders of two Western countries

signing this decree that would essentially overthrow another one.

But I wasn't sure what the Americans were getting out of this.

They were putting this investment in. What was in it for them?

They had a very deep concern about the way events were

working in the world.

The cold war was happening and they wanted above all to prevent

the communists, led by the Soviets, from gaining inroads

anywhere in the Middle East, anywhere where there were

strategic resources, and of course oil was the big issue in Iran.

Operation Ajax was a new approach to energy security,

one in which political treachery was an acceptable

tactic in pursuit of oil.

"With or without a royal decree, Zahedi will take over

"the government and will execute the various requirements of coup day."

'And as these documents show, there was

'no limit to the dirty tricks

'Britain and America were willing to pull.'

I notice the million dollars there.

Yeah. The director, which is the director of Central Intelligence,

on April 4th '53, approved a budget of a million dollars,

which could be used by the Tehran station, the CIA station,

in any way that would bring about the fall of Mossadegh.

And it's just nasty stuff. It's what they call black propaganda.

It's to make Mossadegh look bad in any way possible,

including calling him a homosexual, calling him a Jew, calling him

a pro-communist, calling him anti-religious, you name it.

It's extraordinary to see it all just laid out in black and white.

It is incredible.

'The hope with Operation Ajax was that by orchestrating political

'dissent like this, they would spark a revolution from within.

'Iran's own people would do Britain

'and America's dirty work for them and get rid of Mossadegh.

'But as the secret plot played out, things didn't quite go to plan.'

With the anti-Mossadegh propaganda seeded

and civil unrest well established, Iran's leader began to smell a rat.

Realising the deception,

Mossadegh quickly gathered his prime ministerial guard around him.

Meanwhile, the royal Shah, who'd been persuaded by the British to

go along with their secret plot, panicked and fled the country.

Operation Ajax was in danger of falling apart, but for the CIA

and an oil-desperate Britain there was no turning back now.

They intensified the campaign of civil unrest...

..only now encouraging it to become more violent.

And with black propaganda also claiming that their Shah

had in fact been ousted from his country by the tyrannical

Prime Minister, Mossadegh was doomed.

By August 1953, he was arrested.

The West's new hand-picked leader was in place and the Shah returned.

Mossadegh was quickly tried

and would spend the rest of his life behind bars, whilst

Planet Oil's first coup d'etat was declared a triumphant success.

But Operation Ajax would turn out to be

something of a double-edged sword.

Of course, Britain did get her oil back, but at what cost?

In the end, Britain had to settle for that 50-50 deal that it

had so furiously fought to avoid in the first place.

The war was for nothing.

What this incident had really shown was that Planet Oil had

entered a new phase, where once-powerful Western nations were

now energy orphans who would stop at nothing to ensure

they got the supplies they so desperately needed.

And for addicts like Britain,

the victory of Ajax would soon feel like a miserable defeat.

Far from putting the Middle East in its place,

the Iranian crisis simply lit the touchpaper of oil nationalisation.

Mohammad Mossadegh became a poster boy

to a generation of leaders in the region, all of whom wanted more

control of their own oil, and that just meant more trouble for the UK.

When, in 1956, Egypt's president, Gamal Nasser,

became the latest Mossadegh follower to flex his muscles,

Britain was about to feel the pinch yet again.

Egypt didn't have any oil of its own,

but it did have the Suez Canal running through it,

a waterway that was essential for the transportation

of Britain's crude from the Middle East into Europe.

And Egypt's leader knew just how important that was.

Nasser demanded control of the canal

and the lucrative toll charges it set oil tankers.

When the Anglo-French partnership that owned it refused,

Nasser blockaded it with scuttled ships to show he meant business.

Britain's oil transportation route from the Middle East into Europe was

instantly shut down, and the country was once again in serious trouble.

For Britain, it all had a very familiar ring to it.

Yet again, another Middle Eastern country was holding them

and their oil to ransom.

And just as in the case of the Mossadegh crisis in Iran,

the outcome was going to be messy.

The Suez Crisis, as it became known,

triggered yet more fuel shortages, driving restrictions

and another economic slump in November 1956.

Ironically, it even led to the creation of one of Britain's

most famous cars.

By the winter of 1956, Britain was literally running dry.

The only cars that people could really drive were these tiny

German bubble cars that ran on a smidgeon of fuel.

That was, until Morris Motors designer Alec Issigonis came up

with this little beauty, a new car for a new era,

one in which only the smallest vehicles with the smallest

fuel tanks could afford to run.

Oil poverty might have given birth to a British icon...

..but what cars like the Mini really represented was humiliation

and a terrible reversal of fortunes for a once-great nation.

The colonies they once ran were now in total control of the world's oil.

And amongst these new Middle East giants, the black stuff

flowed like never before.

The term "elephant field" was coined,

a name given to an oil reserve that produced more than

100 million barrels of crude.

These kind of discoveries became ubiquitous across the region...

..and by 1960, seven out of every ten barrels of oil

being produced in the world came out of the Middle East.

This place wasn't just the biggest player in Planet Oil,

it effectively WAS Planet Oil.

But being this plentiful also made it cheap.

With so much oil on the market, its value plummeted to an all-time low.

It soon became apparent that the Middle East's glut

could in fact be its undoing.

If profits were going to be restored,

the industry needed a radical solution...

..and a radical geologist was about to step up and provide one.

A man responsible for the creation

of the world's most powerful oil club.

But it's one that most people haven't even heard of.

Excuse me, I'm doing a little survey.

Do you know who these guys are?

OPEC. No? OPEC?

No?

Do you know who these guys are? OPEC.

OPEC? Mean anything to you?

Have you heard of these guys?

No?

OPEC? OPEC?

They are, like, this big international organisation. Huge.

-Is it not European Community or something?

-No.

These guys kind of control your life in a way, and I just wondered

if you knew what OPEC stood for.

That's the first time I saw that.

-The first time?

-Yeah.

-OK.

No-one seems to have heard of OPEC.

OPEC?

OPEC?

We might not have a clue what it is,

but the decisions that this organisation make

dictate how much our hydrocarbon lives cost each year.

And that's precisely the reason it was created in the first place.

In 1960, the world was producing too much oil,

and this man wanted to do something about it.

Juan Pablo Alfonso, the Venezuelan Energy Minister

and a key figure in South America's oil boom.

Alfonso watched the Middle East's meteoric rise throughout

the '40s and '50s as oil nationalisation took hold.

But with that rise,

he also witnessed the decline in the value of oil.

The new worldwide glut had made this once-precious resource cheap...

..and Alfonso had a plan to make it valuable again.

His idea was to bring together the world's top oil-producing

countries into a kind of private members' club.

But this was no idle gentlemen's dining society, this was a group

focused entirely on controlling production levels

and setting a single, unified price for their oil.

It was a masterstroke.

In September 1960, Alfonso met with

the Saudi Arabian Energy Minister and revealed his plan.

The Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC,

was born, and from that moment,

the status of oil as a commodity would change for ever.

Never again would it flow freely throughout the world.

Instead, it would be drip-fed by the nations who had it

to those who could afford it.

The world's addiction to oil would be controlled by a new

all-powerful cartel of countries who would fix their own prices

and their own output.

It was a win-win situation for the new Arab superpowers, but it was bad

news for nations like Britain, who didn't have their own oil.

MUSIC: Ghost Town by the Specials

OPEC would grow rapidly as all the world's major oil producers joined

the club, and by the early 1970s its rise was complete.

Western oil execs were replaced by slick Arab politicians,

like the Saudi Petroleum Minister, Sheikh Zaki Yamani.

They were now the new masters of crude.

Doesn't this new massive increase in the price of oil mean

a change in the world balance of power between the developing nations

like you, the producers, and us, the developed, industrialised nations?

Yes, it will.

# This town is comin' like a ghost town. #

If countries like Britain wanted their oil,

they'd have to pay men like Yamani the OPEC club price or go without.

But whilst the UK knew all too well just what it was like

to be starved of the most precious natural resource in the world,

for other Western users, going without had never been a problem.

By the early 1970s,

the US was getting the majority of its oil from Saudi Arabia.

It had become the very lifeblood of American society.

Nowhere on the planet was the age of hydrocarbon man

more evident than in this country.

MUSIC: Pick Up The Pieces by Average White Band

Oil had made a generation of Americans

more mobile than ever before.

It had fed them...

..clothed them....

..and built the very fabric of their lives.

But with relations strong between US politicians

and Saudi oil sheikhs, America's oil future was guaranteed.

Wasn't it?

I'm back in Washington to learn about a crucial turning

point in America's oil story.

I remember it quite well.

People were becoming extremely agitated.

They were getting in fights.

-There were even things where people were pulling out their guns.

-Really?

It probably...

..was one of the first major battles...

about guns in the United States,

and people were just carrying their guns openly.

'The event that Washington cab driver Nathan Price is describing

'was a truly seismic one in America's history...

'..a moment when its people were faced with a frightening question -

'what would you do without oil?'

And it was all down to that powerful new oil club OPEC.

MUSIC: All Along The Watchtower by The Jimi Hendrix Experience

It was October 1973.

Egypt and Syria were at war with Israel over the occupation

of Israeli-held territories in the West Bank and the Sinai peninsula.

# There must be some kind of way out of here... #

The US was sympathetic to the Israeli cause

and chose to re-supply them with arms.

# There's too much confusion... #

It was a decision they would pay dearly for.

To appreciate the scale of the disaster in the making,

you have to understand that in this country oil consumption had

been rising at 5% a year for the previous decade.

It was almost like every year Americans were finding

new uses for the stuff.

The US simply couldn't function without oil.

And yet it was about to be forced to.

OPEC, angered by US military support of Israel,

responded in the only way they knew -

by shutting off America's oil supply.

In an instant, the US ran dry.

Within a month, the nation was grinding to a halt.

The cost of gasoline quadrupled...

..and by November 1973, the US President, Richard Nixon,

was forced to address the nation with a grave warning.

This is a special report from CBS News in Washington.

Good evening.

The sudden cut-off of oil from the Middle East has turned the serious

energy shortages we expected this winter into a major energy crisis.

In '73 and, I believe, maybe it was even in '74,

Richard Nixon did not have...

The national Christmas tree wasn't lit.

-Quite symbolic, isn't it?

-It's very symbolic.

And what about other things? Did you see

kind of knock-on effects in the shops of prices going up?

Oh! Well, the biggest other thing that really got to people was

the price of food.

Everything that was produced that maybe needed transportation

and oil, it was like a trickle-down effect, and pretty soon,

the consumers' pocket book began to get hit.

Was there a sense of panic at all?

Oh! People would walk around with a tube in the back of their car,

so they could siphon gas off somebody's car,

and people were pretty much standing on guard on their car and

putting signs on their window - "If you steal my gas, I'll shoot you".

This was completely new territory for America and its people.

It was one thing for Britain to be starved of crude, but when the most

powerful nation on earth had an oil drought, that was a step too far.

-Have you had trouble getting gasoline?

-I have.

-Tell me about it.

Well, instead of getting a full tank,

I get four or five gallons. Never a full tank.

But America's first oil shock also highlighted that this was

only going to get worse.

A solution simply had to be found.

But where to find oil outside of the Middle East?

The US had plundered its own reserves in less than 100 years

and Britain never had any of its own in the first place.

The only place oilmen hadn't really looked for the black stuff

was in what had been considered the last great frontier.

The world's oceans.

It was a place the industry had always tried to avoid,

simply because of the massive technological

challenges of tackling it.

But the world's big oil users were now desperate,

and Britain more so than most.

The UK economy had been crushed by oil droughts throughout

the '50s and '60s.

She needed new oil more than anyone.

And the sea that surrounded her was the last hope of finding it.

The North Sea's fossil fuel potential had first been

identified in the early 1960s,

when a huge gas field was unearthed off the coast of Holland.

Geologists who discovered the find also realised that the very

same rocks that produced fossil fuels here

ran all the way to the British coast.

It was a tantalising clue that they too might contain oil.

Those hot spots were all the incentive

that an oil-desperate government needed.

In '64, they quickly introduced

the UK Continental Shelf Act that divided the North Sea into

something like 960 blocks, or oil sectors.

The race for Britain's oil was on,

and everyone was invited to the party.

But thinking there might be oil was one thing -

actually finding it was something else.

I'm heading out into the North Sea to experience for myself just

what a brutal baptism of fire that search was going to be.

Britain's North Sea pioneers faced an almost unimaginable odyssey

100 miles into one of the most hostile seas in the world.

And if that wasn't hard enough, they then had to drill down through

hundreds of feet of solid bedrock to find oil reserves that they

weren't sure even existed.

Even with the invention of the oilrig, which allowed them

to do that, this was a very risky business.

In December 1965, just a few months after

Britain's North Sea quest began, a small drilling rig,

called Sea Gem, located off the coast of East Anglia,

made history by becoming the first

to find fossil fuels in the North Sea.

It wasn't oil they found, but gas.

But as far as Britain's North Sea pioneers were concerned,

where gas lay, crude would surely follow.

It was a moment of hope that Britain might at last

be about to find some energy of her own.

But the elation was short-lived.

It was just a few days after the discovery,

Boxing Day 1965, in fact, the crew,

32 of them were inside, having a festive lunch

when disaster struck.

Heavy seas caused the legs of the rig to buckle

and the whole structure just toppled into the North sea.

13 men died in those freezing waters.

It was a tragic reminder of the cost of success.

And the fact that today hardly anyone remembers the tale is

probably because, back then, it was considered a price worth paying.

Britain had tasted success

and nothing was going to stop her now, not even human tragedy.

And as the '60s gave way to the '70s,

that potential tapped by the Sea Gem turned out to be spot-on

as the big oil fields everyone had hoped for began to materialise.

BP's fabled Forties field was the first to be tapped in 1970.

Quickly followed in 1971 by the discovery

of Shell's North Sea giant, Brent -

an oil field that produced as much crude

as some of the Middle East's biggest reserves.

It was clear that this was going to be huge business.

And that made competition fierce amongst the big companies.

The stakes were so high that secrecy was the order of the day.

Shell used these Enigma code breakers

to relay the latest messages about oil finds,

whereas BP would send their messages in Farsi, Persian.

Even the British government had this coded alphabet to get

the latest news about the North Sea.

It was like something out of a John Le Carre spy novel.

But that paranoia was justified.

The Brent and Forties fields alone

promised around one million barrels of oil every day.

And when the discovery of yet more oil fields across the North Sea

followed, it was clear just how transformative this was going to be.

Whenever a big oil field was discovered, it was tradition to

hand out cigars to the rig workers - you know, celebrate the success.

Well, in the 1970s, cigars were being handed over

in box loads right across the North Sea.

It was becoming clear that Britain was going to be filthy rich,

and when the Queen formally opened the commercial taps

of the North Sea oil fields in 1975,

the entire world would wake up to just how much.

THE QUEEN: 'If we use it right,'

this flood of energy can,

without doubt, much improve our economic wellbeing.

Government profits from oil production immediately

added around £100 million to treasury coffers.

And by the late 1970s, the UK had become an oil exporter,

for the first time in our history.

We had finally unshackled ourselves

from our 20th-century energy nightmare.

This was going to be an age of plenty,

and a boom the likes of which nobody had seen before.

What could possibly go wrong?

As oil giants and politicians together celebrated this new age

of oil wealth, a dark speck hovered on the horizon that was about to

threaten not just the North Sea, but the whole industry's very existence.

Global warming.

We were all about to be reminded of just how dangerous

our addiction to fossil fuels had become.

Could Planet Oil afford to keep using the black stuff,

or were we going to have to go cold turkey

and give up this precious resource for ever?