Le noir et le bleu: 40 ans d’histoire de Gaz de France by Alain Beltran and Jean-Pierre Williot

Abstract

186 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Le noir et le bleu: 40 ans d’histoire de Gaz de France. By Alain Beltran and Jean-Pierre Williot. Paris: Pierre Belfond, 1992. Pp. 333; illustrations, tables, notes, bibliography, indexes. F 120.00 (paper). “I began my career,” said Pierre Verret, one of thirty-five former managers interviewed for this history of the French national gas company, “in a dusty little office managing the coal deliveries, the furnaces, and shipping out the coke. All I had on the wall was a diagram of the one plant. Soon after nationalization in 1946,1 acquired a map of the whole country with the different plants and pipelines I was in charge of. But when I retired in 1977, I had a map of the whole world on the wall” (p. 275). Gaz de France (GDF) had come a long way from the “black” of the local coal gas companies to the “blue” of natural gas, which is now piped to France from eastern Russia and the North Sea, or liquified and transported in tankers from Africa. To describe the stages of this transformation is the aim of this nicely proportioned book. It also tells about the mission of GDF as a public monopoly serving the “general interest,” alongside the superstars of public enterprise: French Rail (SNCF), France Telecom, and of course French Electric (EDF), all three admired worldwide for their expertise in high-speed trains, telematics (e.g., Minitel), and nuclear power, respectively. From the late 1950s, when the major deposit at Lacq became available, GDF first domesticated American pipeline technology and then developed techniques for liquifying methane and importing it in tankers. Today a modest workforce of 29,000 operates 25,000 km of pipelines in France (a country the size of Texas) and, through contracts and consortia, serves as the western anchor of the all-European network of 500,000 km. Its dozen underground gas reservoirs hold the energy equivalent of several nuclear reactors, but with fewer environmental or safety concerns. Nor has GDF failed to emulate the bigger “national champions” in selling its know-how on the world market from Portugal to a methane terminal in South Korea. Why then does gas account for only 12 percent of energy use in France but 46 percent in the Netherlands and 22 percent in Italy? Why in Germany does gas supply 75 percent of the new housing, but only 25 percent in France? Because of EDF’s overwhelming nuclear electric system, which exists nowhere else. But the historical reason is that when the first oil shock struck in 1973-74, GDF was not yet ready to step into the energy gap it left. Prospects for a major supply in Algeria had been bright. GDF signed long-term contracts to transport it in tankers to its terminals. But the liquifying plant at Skikda in Algeria broke down at the same time as the Middle East crisis shut off cheap oil. Though well enough prepared in pipeline and liquid methane technology, GDF lacked the supply to claim a larger share of the home market. The huge deposits in the Netherlands, the USSR, and Norway that today supply 60 percent of France’s gas were not yet accessible. And once the massive TECHNOLOGYAND CULTURE Book Reviews 187 investment in nuclear electrification had been launched in 1974, there was no going back. (Ironically, Algerian methane, so desperately needed in the 1970s, has risen sharply to 30 percent of French supply since 1981.) But geopolitical contingency was not all. GDF was always the runt among public enterprises—malnourished. From nationalization in 1946 to the turn toward natural gas in 1957, modernist planners saw gas as an old form of energy to be used only until better could be developed. While investment in EDF’s hydroelectric program soared, GDF was deprived. Graduates of elite schools spurned underpaid careers as gaziers. Even after GDF mastered natural gas in the 1960s, state-pricing policies favored both electricity and petroleum over gas, and GDF’s advertising budget was meager. Today, with the price of oil so low, and France exporting surplus electricity cheaply to neighboring countries to pay the interest on EDF’s...