The Hidden Industry

Abstract

Virtually unnoticed and unremarked, Britain’s onshore oil industry has been producing steadily from wells deep in the countryside for several decades. To the vast majority of the population, which has never or only rarely seen a drilling rig or ‘nodding donkey’ pumping unit, it has remained a hidden industry, the preserve of a small, if select, band of business and professional enthusiasts, most of them employed by one company, British Petroleum. In times of crisis, usually war, the onshore oil industry has been ‘rediscovered’ by governments and private entrepreneurs and stirred to greater efforts. When, on these occasions, it has caught the public eye, the industry has failed to excite, falling short of public perceptions of oilmen and oilfields nurtured on newsreel clippings of American gushers and blow-outs. At other times, it has been written off as an industry without a future, ‘a museum curiosity’ in the words of one observer. By and large, though, those participating in the search for and production of the oil and gas that undoubtedly lies beneath Britain’s fields have been left to their unglamorous task, as bit players on a national energy scene dominated by the big battalions of coal and, more recently, offshore oil.