Looking for the Sixpence

Natural gas is one of nature's richest prizes, and the hunt for it increases in tempo as the world's need for power grows. Right now, the biggest, the most expensive and the most melodramatic search is taking place in Europe's North Sea. Convinced that the North Sea covers the world's biggest bubble of natural gas, such major oil companies as Esso, Shell, Texaco and British Petroleum are scrambling to win a share of it, plan to spend $100 million on exploration and test drilling in the next three years. The stakes are so great (billions of dollars in gas sales to the Common Market) that last week the question of who owns the gas caused a formal debate in the Dutch Parliament, and was the subject of hot discussion in the German Bundestag. "It is like cutting up a plum pudding," explains Royal Dutch Petroleum President John H. Loudon. "Everyone wants the piece with the sixpence in it."

Out to Sea. Gas men have been after the North Sea sixpence ever since Esso and Shell in 1960 found a mammoth gas pocket (estimated reserves: 1 trillion cubic meters) in the Dutch coastal province of Groningen, near the German frontier. Studying their maps, they concluded that the pocket extended far beyond Groningen out under the sea, last year began exploring the bottom. Seismographic tests were unanimous; though no gas has actually been found at sea, geologists are now convinced that the North Sea hides tens of trillions of cubic meters of gas, dwarfing even the two trillion cubic meters under the Texas Panhandle, long thought to be the world's largest gas field.

Drilling was started off the Dutch coast, but the biggest pockets of gas are now thought to lie in the waters off Germany. Bonn's Ministry for Economic Affairs has more than 25 requests for permission to drill in German waters, including one by the German-American North Sea Consortium that includes Socony Mobil, Indiana Standard and Esso. The consortium is prepared to spend $25 million this year and next drilling for gas off the German coast, and will soon start to drill near the island of Borkum.

Hot & Disputatious. The trouble is that the consortium already has permission to drill from the coastal states of Lower Saxony, Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg and Bremen, whose right to grant such permission is now hotly disputed by Bonn. An even thornier question is how to divide mineral rights between Germany and Holland, as well as among Denmark, Norway and Great Britain, all of whom front on the North Sea. Hope that these five nations could deal objectively with the issue looks dim. "It seems to us that countries that in past ages have had only trouble from the sea," said Rotterdam's Algemeen Dagblad, "now should be allowed to have full profits from that sea." With similar reactions echoing through other capitals, the signs were for a hot and disputatious summer along the sandy shores of the North Sea.

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