The Plan To Nationalize The Oil Companies

It was 1976. Lindsey well remember that day when he walked into the office of Mr. X, and I remarked, “Sir, I sure have been having a good time lately rubbing shoulders with rich people. There’s no need for me to travel around the world … I can meet them all right here in Prudhoe Bay. I’m the only Chaplain around,”

Lindsey chuckled, “I’m the only Chaplain that can tell people who are muslim that Jesus Christ loved them and died for them. It’s been a real privilege to tell these people that Christ died for sinners whether they come from muslim countries, from the lower 48, or anywhere else. It’s been interesting to tell them the Christian Gospel They would not come to my church service, but they still heard the fact that salvation is available to each of them individually, if they will accept the Savior whom I love and serve.”

Mr. X looked at Mr. Lindsey, interested, and perhaps a little surprised that he was going to present the Gospel in that way. However, he knew Lindsey, and had come to respect him.

Mr. X kind of laughed as he listened to Lindsey, and then he commented, “Well, Chaplain, where else could you get an audience like that—where else could you go in all the world to get people to listen to the gospel message in the way you presented it to these men?”

Lindsey said to him, “Sir, thank you for making it all possible. I really appreciate you letting me rub shoulders with these guys.”
He continued, “By the way, Mr. X, why is it that all these men are up here at Prudhoe Bay all of a sudden? I used to see men like them now and then—they came through periodically, but lately we’ve had a flood of the biggest men in the world as far as financing is concerned.”

Mr. X got up from his desk and at first was somewhat cautious. The smile disappeared from his face, and it was replaced by a frown. He closed his office door, then with a very sad look on his face, he said, “Chaplain, Atlantic Richfield has just completed the transaction of borrowing the worth of the company.”

Lindsey exclaimed, “That’s bankruptcy!”

He did not like the word “bankruptcy” but he remarked in his own way that was just about the size of what was happening. Lindsey had commented that it was financial suicide, and he acknowledged that was what was taking place. At that point Mr. X and Lindsey talked again about the conversation he had with Senator Chance back in 1975, when Mr. X had remarked that the government wanted to nationalize the oil companies.

As they carried on in their conversation that day in 1976, Lindsey said to Mr. X, “You have just completed the borrowing of the worth of the company?”

“Yes, Chaplain,” he answered.
Lindsey looked at him and said, “But why?”
Mr. X said, “Chaplain, we are struggling for survival.”

Lindsey replied, “But, sir, that is not what they tell us. They say that the oil companies are huge monsters that are robbing the people of America. As American people, we have been told that the oil companies have no need of money—that they are great wealthy barons that have more than they could ever dare dream of. Why this big struggle for survival?”

Mr. X remarked, “Chaplain, the only reason we borrowed the worth of the company was that we might complete the Trans-Alaska Oil Pipeline—and in so doing, remain solvent by the sale of the oil.”

Then so many things came together in my Lindsy's mind. Cost overruns had caused the costs to be increased from an estimated $600,000,000 in 1971 to the actual cost of the Pipeline being $12,000,000,000.

No company could stand such cost increases in just a few short years—and that applies to even the wealthy oil barons. So now Atlantic Richfield was in debt for the amount of their total corporate worth.

At this point even more things began to add up. Not only were there extreme cost overruns, but there were the false claims of faulty welding, withdrawals of permits, orders to dig up pipes. There were Union “wobblings” or “slow down” factors. “Stop the flow of oil” seemed to be the constant intent. There was the building of those $10,000 outhouses, a flotilla was frozen and allowed to be crushed by the ice, and then there were those falcons—at a million dollars each.

There were also the absurd rules concerning the “precious tundra,” and ridiculous Federal laws and regulations, and excessive and unwarranted fines, and more ….

Yes, it all added up now. And now, one of the major oil companies of America had borrowed the worth of the company—just to survive. But then there is the matter of interest on $12 billion dollars. Can you imagine what the interest would be on $12 billion dollars? … at today’s interest rates that are going up all the time?

Lindsey laughed within himself as he remembered a picture on the wall in one of the dorms. It was a picture of a little child sitting on a potty. Beside the child was a roll of toilet paper. As the child reached for a piece of toilet paper, the caption under the picture read, “The job isn’t finished until the paper work is done.”

Yes, there were literally rooms filled with paperwork. Companies had been hired to do nothing but manage the paperwork of records. Daily, airplanes were traveling back and forth from camps to Fairbanks and Anchorage, doing nothing but carrying men who were traveling to take care of paperwork. Almost daily some official on the Pipeline would come to Lindsey and say, “Chaplain, I’m so frustrated I hardly know where to turn, because we’ve been applying for that permit for weeks. They know the job has to be stopped until that permit is given. All this time my men are sitting there, doing nothing while we’re waiting on the State to make surveys, and to decide a simple question of a minor permit that prior to this we had no problem whatsoever getting. In these last six months of the Pipeline these permits are taking longer and longer, going through the maze of bureaucracy. The paperwork has gotten to the point that it’s momentous.”

Lindsey asked himself a question, to which he then put to Mr. X: “Sir, does the United States government own the oil companies?”

Lindsey Williams does not remember his exact words, but paraphrased it was something like this,

“No. The United States government does not own the oil companies literally, but they might as well. After all, it’s their land that we produce the oil from, on the North Slope of Alaska, and they might just as well have built the Trans-Alaska Pipeline—after all, we can do nothing at all without their permits. Not even to the building of a section of a haul road, or laying of a gravel pad, or the drilling of a well, or the production of so many barrels of oil a day from that well. In fact, we are told almost everything we are to do. We don’t really run this job.”

Lindsey asked, Does the Federal government own the oil companies of America? They tell them how many dollars they have to spend to put a smog protection device on their refineries. They tell them exactly how the ships have to be built to haul the oil to California, and to Washington, and to Oregon, after it has been taken out of the North Slope of Alaska. If all that’s not enough, they even tell them the kind of paperwork they have to turn in to prove everything they are doing.

After Lindsey put the question to Mr.X about the Federal government’s owning the oil companies, Mr. X said to him very sincerely, “Chaplain, they will soon. The fact is that if we don’t flow that oil in time, we will go into bankruptcy.”

For the first time, Lindsey Williams had heard it with his own ears. That was it—that was really what they were after. He finally had the last piece to the puzzle, and at last, the whole picture fitted together.

Lindsey heard one of the men say one day, “I work for the purpose of paying taxes.” That was it. The Federal government was aiming at total control. They knew that if they could stop the flow of oil, they would bankrupt the oil companies, and there would automatically be nationalization of the oil industry.

From this time on, Lindsey Williams looked even more carefully. He would talk to the men after he preached, and I realized that the whole idea, for that period of six months, was to stop the flow of oil.

It was at that point, he had to go back and see Mr. X again, and did. Lindsey remembered the day that he asked him the question, “Mr. X, is the Federal government attempting to delay the flow of oil on the Alaska pipeline?”

He emphatically said, “Yes!” He was angry and did not say it in a way that I would put into his book.

He said, “Yes, they’re trying to delay the flow of oil.” Then he continued, “I’m going to go a step further. Chaplain, if they delay the flow of oil for a period of six months, the oil companies of America will be thrown into bankruptcy.”

He had already referred to the possibility of bankruptcy, but now it seemed a much closer possibility. Lindsey went out onto the job again. He had heard Mr. X say it. It really was a deliberate scheme, and he had seen it. More and more regulations. Rules. Withdrawing of permits—so it had gone, on and on and on.

As Lindsey talked to the men, they indicated the same situation. They were agreed that there was a deliberate intention to delay the flow of oil. He went back to his room and prayed about it all day.

Lindsey Williams came up with a conclusion in his mind: “There is an energy crisis in America, artificially induced, and if not, why did they close down that cross-country pipeline in Wheatland, Wyoming?

They are trying to produce an oil crisis, and if this oil was allowed to flow on time, it would produce two million barrels of oil a day, at its maximum output. That is a great amount of the precious oil that America needs.”

If the government managed to nationalize the oil companies, that would virtually have broken the back of private enterprise in America. Lindsey began to get in touch with the men even more. He made it a point to ride the line each day, to get up earlier than he had been doing, to find an oil official who would allow him to ride around in his truck all the day, just for the sake of talking.

He rode with one oil company official today, and another tomorrow, and another the next day. He would keep asking questions. Lindsey was after the truth, and one oil company official would not know what the other had told him.

One day, Lindsey Williams rode with one of the men who was responsible for certain parts of the procedures associated with the final flow of the oil—Lindsey will not identify him any more than that (or the places they rode in his pickup truck) for he wants to protect his anonymity. But Lindsey watched, and saw something that he could hardly believe, because he had never seen this before.

That incident gave Lindsey the impression, that there was suddenly a dramatic change in the attitude of oil company officials. They had “come out fighting.”

By now there were two to three months until oil flow. Lindsey had watched as the project became of immense size, and the number of men on the Slope grew day by day, with the camps all full and the job running full speed ahead. He had seen both the Federal and the State governments withdraw different permits, and literally back the oil companies into a corner where they had to fight. The only way that the oil companies could survive was to flow that oil on the given date.

How did they do it? By now, the job had grown to such an enormous size that there weren’t enough State and Federal inspectors to keep up with every aspect of the job. Lindsey watched, for last six months of the Pipeline project, as the oil companies literally bulldogged, disregarding the stringent restrictions that had been placed on them by the Federal and State governments.

When they were caught, they would pay the fines, and the fines for petty offenses ran into many thousands of dollars—but most of the time they were not caught.

They literally rushed madly forward in an attempt to survive and to flow that oil on time, regardless of what it took to do it. They knew the welds on the big pipeline were not faulty, they knew that the tremendous increases in cost overruns had been caused by exorbitant inflation and unnecessary regimentation. They knew that the practice of withdrawing permits and the issuing of new permits was not correct, either morally or legally. They literally overran the restrictions imposed by the government, and there was nothing the government officials could do about it, because they simply could not keep up with the fast pace.

That oil was going to flow on time. Lindsey had never seen this attitude before. Such an attitude had not been there during the first two years and three months of the construction of the oil pipeline, because during that time all regulations were very stringently followed. All permits were carefully obeyed, but now it was quite to the contrary.

This great animal of a private enterprise had been backed into a corner, and it was fighting for survival. That was after Atlantic Richfield had borrowed the worth of the company. Lindsey did not know what the other companies on the pipeline did, but does know what this one did, and it was the major producer on the east side of the oil field on the one 100-square mile area from which they had been allowed to produce.

Lindsey watched them as they literally fought for survival. They defied the government officials, because they knew it was only a matter of months and then there would be nothing more they could do about it.

They flowed the oil on time despite a direct attempt by the Federal and State governments to stop that flow from going. It was an intentional plan to bankrupt the oil companies of America so that the oil industry could be nationalized—but they did not succeed.

There was a very serious, concerted attempt to frustrate the oil companies and to make their costs so exorbitant that they would be forced into bankruptcy. It also seems that ultimately one of the ideas was to so discredit the oil companies in the minds of the public that they would be all too ready to allow the whole of the oil industry to be nationalized. The oil companies were to be blamed for the price of gas going up—they were to be the scapegoats, made to appear to be raking in exorbitant profits, while in fact they were being brought to the point where they were enduring a tremendous fight for survival.

Reference: http://www.lindseywilliams.net/lindsey-williams-the-energy-non-crisis-chapter-14/