| Introduction | Executive Summary | Conclusions |
Degrees of involvement
Most of us would like to see the oil industry rapidly downsized. But it is being kept afloat by all kinds of strange partners - not least universities and colleges in the UK, who provide a massive hidden subsidy. Corporate Watch was called in to investigate, and our report is to be published early next year. Greg Muttitt reports.
On Thursday 29th October, a group of Shell employees were travelling across London. Their mission: to persuade students from Imperial College to pursue a career in Shell.
Imperial is one of the oil industry's top recruiting grounds, former geology lecturer Jeremy Leggett calls it "the Royal School of Oil". It's the industry’s biggest research institution in the higher education sector so students should all be well briefed on the workings of the oil industry. The Rector of Imperial College is one Sir Ronald Oxburgh, who moonlights as a non-executive director of ... Shell Transport & Trading plc. Imperial is almost a part of the industry itself.
So our friends from recruitment must have been quietly confident as they traveled across town. But their evening didn't quite go to plan. As they asked the participants for questions and comments, they were hit with the question: "After a year Shell still has not been able to fulfil its offer to debate with the I.C.U Environmental Society. How can students make up their mind on who to believe about Shell's proven record of human rights violation and environmental destruction if you won't even engage in open debate?" [1]
Public relations sophisticates don't try to shut their opponents up - that way they win the debate. So companies like Shell know to allow critics a chance to speak: hopefully they'll be ill-informed, or at least bad public speakers.
But the plucky student was well prepared. He delivered a ten minute presentation to 150 prospective Shell employees on issues ranging from Ogoniland to why not to believe in Shell's renewable energy programme. The audience could be top managers and directors in a couple of decades. At least some will now think again about career choice.
So what's all the fuss about?
Back in April 1997, Corporate Watch were sitting in an Oxford cafe with a Greenpeace campaigner. He had a vision - he told us how no one wants to work for the nuclear industry these days. It's seen as a dead-end, and the quality of graduates it can recruit is low. Imagine if we could attach a similar kind of stigma to oil. Two of the world's biggest oil companies are based here, and controlled by managers and directors who have mostly come through UK universities.
So we undertook a research project into the relationship between oil companies and universities, to lead into a campaign. Now, 19 months later, the project is finished. The report, Degrees of Involvement, is to be released early in 1999.
Universities - a cause of climate change?
Our report reveals extensive collaboration between UK academic institutions and the world's dirtiest industry. Universities carry out an estimated £67m per year of research and development (R&D) for the oil industry, in about 980 individual projects [2].
Imperial College is responsible for 145 of these. Other big fish are Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, the Universities of Newcastle and Southampton, and University College, London. The most important scientific field is geological (460 projects) - how to find new fields and exploit them.
There is also the development of new technology and drilling techniques, enabling industry to extract oil from increasingly marginal areas - such as the Atlantic Frontier. All of this research serves to expand available oil resources, helping the industry to grow.
By contrast, renewable energy sources receive only about 190 R&D projects, worth just £11.6m per year [3]. This effort into reducing the cost of renewable energy is counteracted by the much larger oil research budget. As the oil supply is expanded, and extraction cost reduced, the oil prices decrease, and renewables remain relatively more expensive. So the Higher Education sector helps to keep oil in and renewables out, keeping us on course for climate catastrophe.
And who's paying for this madness?
As usual, it's you and me. The direct public subsidy for oil industry R&D in universities is estimated at £36m per year.
Furthermore, competing with industry for valuable research contracts, universities tend to under-bid. This means that much of the overhead costs come from their core budgets. The Universities Statistical Record of 1993/94 shows that of the 'Top Ten' research institutions, only Imperial College recovered more than 50% of the overheads employed in industry-sponsored research, with 69%; Oxford recovered 34%, Cambridge 28% and Edinburgh only 24% [4].
Environmental research?
According to the supporters of the oil / university partnership, universities' R&D for the industry helps companies improve safety and environmental performance. However, of 980 projects, just 65 relate to these areas [5]. Furthermore, safety research projects receive a much greater proportion of public funding than other areas - suggesting that (heaven forbid) the industry might be trying to externalise its costs.
Four years ago, the vast majority of research into the industry's environ-mental impact was also paid for by the taxpayer [6].
However, the industry has recognised the "value" both of showing support for environmental research, and of dominating the debate on its impacts.
In the wake of the Valdez spill Exxon flew three British scientists to Alaska. They reported that, "The effects of the cleanup, coupled with the scouring action of winter storms, left the shoreline largely free of oil by the spring of 1990... There is evidence that [the] remaining oil is neither toxic nor harmful" [7]. Meanwhile other scientists reported that substantial oil remained, causing damage. Exxon chose three scientists who were known to be "sceptical" about the ecological damage caused by oil spills. And Exxon's Otto Harrison later told an Institute of Petroleum seminar that the American public found a scientific message more credible if spoken in an English accent [8].
Jobs for the boys
The other resource that oil companies extract from universities is young talent. Robert Gordon University and the University of Aberdeen are the top providers of recruits. Both are in the UK's oil capital, Aberdeen. This proximity to the offshore industry obviously leads to a strong relationship. The other two key recruiting grounds are Imperial College and Heriot-Watt University. Both specialise in oil and gas research and, as a consequence, the undergraduate curricula reflect the industry's needs. These four institutions between them provided 40% of the industry's graduate intake in 1995/96 [9].
Recruitment is helped by a close company-university relationship, but many of the factors which influence student career choices are quite informal, from lecture topics to advertising in departments. Factors such as sandwich courses and donations to departments are not well recorded, so the mechanisms of recruitment are very difficult to quantify. For example, Esso sponsors fellowships in chemical engineering, one of which was awarded to Dr. David Faraday at Surrey University, who had previously arranged industrial placements for his students with Esso. [10]
Recent years have seen course curricula increasingly tailored to meet industry needs. Sometimes this involves the inclusion of industry-relevant modules in the courses. However some HEIs offer entirely specialised degrees in oil and gas. Curricula are often set in consultation with industry representatives. The strongest example of this is Robert Gordon University. Its Principal and Vice Chancellor, Prof. Bill Stevely, boasts, "Industry input does not stop at initial course content; the University ensures that these courses are kept up-to-date and fully in-line with the industry's requirements by consulting a Course Advisory Board containing representatives from major drilling companies and asset managers within the oil and gas industry" [11].
In contrast, career paths in renewable energy are much less clearly defined, helping to enhance the oil industry's competitive advantage.
And in return?
To maintain their influence over research priorities and course curricula, oil and gas companies provide staff for HEIs and give generous donations. The biggest donation to date by the sector was BP's gift of £19.5m to Cambridge University in 1998 for an institute specialising in petroleum studies.
A tour of the UK's universities finds no shortage of oil industry branding - which of course does no harm to the recruitment effort. The Enterprise Oil Building at Heriot-Watt, the Shell Department of Chemical Engineering at Cambridge, the Mobil Lecturer in Production Geoscience at Aberdeen, the Elf Senior Lecturer in Earth Resources Engineering at Imperial, the BP Professor of Information Engineering at Oxford, are just a few [12].
Personal connections are also fostered: former industry staff taking academic positions, from lowly technicians right up to the head of Imperial College. Holding influence in key places helps to keep academics focused on industry priorities.
The connections are there at policy level too. Industry is well represented on the grant awarding boards of the Research Councils EPSRC and NERC, and other policy bodies. Renewable energy representation is minimal. John Cadogan, the Director General of Research Councils, was previously BP's research director. [13]. Robin Nicholson, a non-executive director of BP, is a member of the government's Council for Science and Technology, which advises ministers on science issues [14]. John Avery, formerly of Esso Petroleum, is now head of Real Estate Management at the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE), where he's responsible for a capital budget of £100m, and leads HEFCE's work in promoting private finance in higher education [15]. The list goes on.
Kickin' back
But dissent is growing. In spring 1998, Dr Peter Singer created a furore by refusing to take part in a series of lectures at the Centre for Philosophical Studies at King's College, London, because they were sponsored by Shell [17]. While researching Degrees of Involvement we found that many academics were uncomfortable about working for industry, but felt unable to speak out. The strength of feeling is captured by Valentine Cunningham, Professor of English at Corpus Christi College, Oxford: "Our current academic scene has become a field of corporate naming, a semiotic of trade names, a map of corporate logos, a loud tribute to the power of capitalistic imperialism" [18].
If our analysis is correct, once the issue of industry "partnership" is on the agenda, there will be no shortage of academics keen to get involved. And there is every reason for them to do so. As Nigel Woodcock, a professor of Geology at the University of Cambridge, points out, “geologists have more feel than most for how the earth works.” We see the geological record littered with the debris of past climatic extremes. We, of all people, should be able to spot the threat of a slow catastrophe beginning to happen; to see the climate-modelers' writing on the greenhouse wall." Yet, Woodcock notes, "There are many geological jobs in finding fossil fuels so we are therefore reluctant to admit the link between fossil fuels and global warming. People in glasshouses don't throw stones" [19]
The challenge is already being taken up. Student groups in Oxford, Cambridge and elsewhere have been subverting oil companies' recruitment efforts, as well as raising the issue of R&D support in student papers and through demonstrations. And at Imperial College, the centre of the oil industry's intellectual infrastructure, students have signed a petition calling for Ron Oxburgh to clarify his conflict of interests.
It is on our campuses that the next battle in the carbon war will take place.
1 - e-mail from t.c.smith@ic.ac.uk to GSN mailing list, 2/11/98
2 - Centre for Marine & Petroleum Technology - International Petroleum Research Directory, 1997
3 - EC projects listed on www.cordis.lu; EPSRC projects listed on www.epsrc.ac.uk; DTI funding in Energy paper 62 - New & Renewable Energy - future prospects for the UK; plus Corporate Watch survey - see Degrees of Involvement
4 - Industry and Higher Education, Vol.10, No.1, Feb. 1996, p.6
5 - op.cit.2
6 - Centre for Marine & Petroleum Technology - International Petroleum Research Directory, 1994
7 - Forum for Applied Research and Public Policy, Winter 1991, pp. 24-26
8 - Otto Harrison (of Exxon), lecture to Institute of Petroleum, 4/3/92
9 - Higher Education Statistics Agency, HESA Individualised Student Record
1995/96; HESA First Destinations Supplement 1995/96
10 - Industry and Higher Education, Vol.10, No.2, June '96
11 - 'Lifetime Learning', Supplement to Petroleum Review, February 1998, pp.27-29
12 - see Degrees of Involvement for individual references
13 - FT 19-11-93 p.25, "Oiling the Wheels of Research"
14 - British Petroleum Company plc, Annual Report, 1996, p.59
15 - Hobsons, "Managing Higher Education", Issue 1, Winter 1995
16 - Dave Elliott, Technology Foresight: an interim review of the UK exercise, p.4
17 - Guardian, 6/5/98, p.17
18 -Times Higher Education Supplement, 25/10/96, p.15
19 - Geoscientist, vol.1 no.6, pp.8-11
Degrees of Involvement, by Greg Muttitt and Chris Grimshaw, will be available from February 1999, from Corporate Watch, for £10 (student / unwaged), £15 (waged), £20 (organisation)