Getting a Handle on Energy

By Marshall Loeb

A richer bunch of gloomsayers than America's oilmen would be hard to find. While their profits climb the Richter scale, they are rightly concerned that their companies are losing power as OPEC countries increasingly skip around hem to sell oil directly to governments. They grouse that energy policy is a bureaucratic mess, that Americans lack the will and cohesion to make the compromises necessary to develop synthetic fuels and that the nation generally is going to pot in a gasoline bucket.

One fellow who stands out as a refreshing yea-sayer is Thornton Bradshaw, president of Los Angeles' Atlantic Richfield Co.(sales: $16.7 billion) But then Bradshaw, 62, is not an ordinary oil company boss. He is a bleeding heart conservative. Some of his best friends are environmentalists. Puffing his briar, he quietly debates them as a director of the Conservation Foundation. He says all the right things about fiscal prudence, but he also defends many Government regulations, calls for more foreign aid and advocates mutual nuclear disarmament. A card-carrying intellectual, he is an overseer, visitor or fellow of three universities, including Harvard, where he earned B.A, M.B.A. and Doctor of Commercial Science degrees and once taught business.

Right now Bradshaw can talk about President Carter's energy program, and even the windfall profits tax, without turning purple. That policy, in Bradshaw's view, is based on four reasonable points.

The first is oil price decontrol, which environmentalists as well as energy developers believe is necessary for conservation. Carter is moving as fas on decontrol as politically possible, says Bradshaw. "Decontrol is a bitter pill for the American people to swallow, and the excess profits tax is a necessary sugar coating for that pill. Atlantic Richfield never fought against it."

The second policy thrust is to spur construction of energy-producing projects by speeding settlements of environmental disputes that block them, while still recognizing what Bradshaw calls "the very legitimate claims of environmentalists." To do just that, it was he who proposed to Carter at last summer's Camp David summit that the Government create the Energy Mobilization Board. But Bradshaw would limit the board's powers. Says he: "It should possess power to expedite selected energy projects but not to shove them down the country's throat by overriding existing environmental law." In short, don't bend the law, but speed the decisions.

The third thrust is to get moving on synthetic energy. But Bradshaw believes that Carter's original notion of $88 billion in Government aid over the next ten years to generate 2.5 million bbl. of synthetic fuel a day was wildly unrealistic. "We just cannot spend that sum intelligently now because we dont have the technological ability and we don't know enough about the sociologic and environmental problems that might develop." Some $20 billion in aid seems more sensible to Bradshaw. Wealthy Atlantic Richfield may not need any federal help to build its first, $1.5 billion to $2 billion oil shale plant, though smaller firms may well require tax credits or price guarantees. By 1990, Bradshaw believes, perhaps 20 such plants could be squeezing out 500,00 bbl. of oil a day

The final, necessary thrust is a series of conservation moves, including standby rationing. Without rationing, Bradshaw fears the U.S will face the hard choice of either shortages or import surges in the early 1980s. Domestic reserves are declining, and while there is potential for vast discovery deep below the hostile, ice-choked waters of the Beaufort Sea off Alaska and Canada that will take years to prove and develop. So will solar power, though Bradshaw's firm is spending millions experimenting with it, and "our company will play any wild card in solar. But when we think of alternatives to oil in the 1980s, we are simply stuck with coal and nuclear."

For all these hurdles, says Bradshaw, "I have the cautiously optimistic hope that the country is finally getting a handle on the energy problem. We have got to take what President Carter has offered and make it work." After all, it is th only energy policy that the nation has.

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