fines and limits national security and reasonable competitive equities as reasons for placement of information in the confidential or secret library. Provides for removal of information more than 25 years old from the confidential or secret library to the public library. Provides for hearings in cases of dispute on placement of information in a particular library of the System, and for placement of information in question in the secret library pending resolution of the dispute. Provides penalties for unauthorized disclosures and thefts of information from the System, and for failure to provide required information for the System. Authorizes Secretary of Commerce or the Director to obtain from an affiliate of a company, or an organization of which it is a member, any information which they are empowered by this Act to obtain directly from the company, provided the company is notified. Gives Secretary of Commerce and Director power to inspect records and subpena documents in certain cases. Confers jurisdiction on District Courts to enforce such subpenas. Title III: Energy Resources Inventories and Inspections by the Department of the Interior.-Directs Secretary of the Interior to compile and maintain, on annual basis, an inventory of mineral fuel reserves and other natural energy resources in public lands of the U.S., including the Outer Continental Shelf. Provides that the inventories may be based on estimates, supplemented as feasible by onsite geological and engineering inspections by departmental personnel. Provides that the first inventory is to be completed within 18 months and reported to Congress within 20 months of effective date of this title. Provides that copies of all such annual reports by the Secretary of the Interior be furnished the Director for the System's public library. Provides that, on request of the Director, the Secretary of the Interior shall make onsite physical inspections of mineral fuel reserves and natural energy resources reported in private lands. Contains directions for the contents of reports by the Secretary of the Interior. Title IV: Information on Mineral Fuel Reserves and Natural Energy Resources-Provides that substantial energy resources companies are to file verified annual reports with the Director on the mineral fuel reserves and natural energy resources they control. Contains directions on the contents of such reports. Provides for promulgation by the Director of forms for the making of such reports and also of the reports required by title V of this Act. Provides for clearance of such forms by Office of Management and Budget within seven months after the effective date of this title. Provides that such forms shall be mailed by the Director to reporting companies within 11 months of effective date of this title and be returned by companies to the Director within 60 days after receipt. Provides for single rather than dual reports by companies which are both substantial energy resources companies and major energy companies, as defined in Act (companies controlling $5 million in mineral fuel reserves, $50 million in other natural energy resources, or $50 million in sales or assets in the energy industries are, generally, within the definitions). Provides that information obtained by Director on report forms required by this title and title V shall be placed in the public, confidential, or secret library of the System, as provided elsewhere in this Act.

Title V Information on the Energy Industries-Requires major energy companies in commerce to file verified annual reports, on an establishment basis, on their operations worldwide. Provides for the making of such reports in two parts, one being for the public library of the System and the other for the confidential or secret library. Contains directions for the contents of such reports, including information on shipments by Standard Industrial Classification, total business receipts, and in certain cases profit information. Authorizes the Director to require such reports more often than annually in certain cases, and to require from major energy companies lists describing all mandatory and voluntary reports they file elsewhere, containing energy information.

Title VI: General Accounting Office Oversight-Provides that Comptroller General of the U.S., upon his own initiative or by direction of Congress, shall review and evaluate procedures of the Bureau. Review may include issues arising under claims that certain energy information required by the Bureau under this Act is proprietary or involves the national security and therefore is entitled to be kept secret. Directs Comptroller General to report to Congress at least annually on such reviews of the Bureau; but provides that such report may be by endorsement of or addendum to the Bureau's own annual report.

Title VII: Conformance of and with other statutes-Provides that the Director may excuse a company from providing energy information required by this

Act, if the company waives confidential status of the same information as previously provided by it to the Census Bureau and protected by the Census Code [13 U.S.C 9. Amends the "Freedom of Information Act," 5 U.S.Cm 552, to provide that clauses (4) and (9) of subsection (b), pertaining to corporate and geological information, shall be construed consistently with policy of this Energy Information Act. Amends Federal Reports Act of 1942, 44 U.S.C 3504, 3506, 3508 and 3509, to make it consistent with policy and purposes of this Act.

Title VIII: Miscellaneous-Contains usual separability section and blanket authorization of appropriations. Establishes effective date as date of enactment, except titles IV and V, which are made effective on first day of third full calendar month after date of enactment.

[From the Washington Post, Dec. 2, 1973]

NORTH SEA OIL: MORE THAN WE KNOW

(By Bernard D. Nossiter)

London. Sometimes next summer, a tanker is due to take 10,000 barrels of oil from the Arygyll Field in the North Sea, 200 miles east of Edinburgh, and land the precious cargo in Aberdeen.

This will be Britain first oil delivery from the cold and forbidding waters above its contenental shelf, the start of a flow with incalculable economic and political consequences.

The government here is modestly estimating that the North Sea will yield about 2 million barrels daily a decade from now about two-thirds of what officials think Britain will then consume. This would be pleasant for Britain but of no great consequence for Western Europe as a whole.

The official line here echoes Frank McFadzean, the managing director or chief of the huge Royal Dutch Shell Co. "The realization of present hopes for the North Sea," he said recently, "will not materially change Western Europe's dependence on Outside sources for the foreseeable future there is simply

no alternative source (to the) Middle East."

However, interviews with oil company executives, their bankers, geologists and economists, make clear two things: The British government has persistently underestimated the oil resources of the North Sea, and deliberately turned attention away from its sizeable deposits of natural gas.

NOBODY KNOWS FOR CERTAIN

For oil alone, British officials are reliably reported to have privately doubled their figure of the sea's likely yield. In the City of London, where unromantic financiers raise the money for risky drilling ventures, this doubled estimate is doubled again.

If the money men are right and the North Sea yields 8 million barrels a day of oil, plus the equivalent of another few million barrels daily in gas, the picture changes dramatically. The continental shelf off Britain and Norway would then, in oil company jargon, become far more "interesting" for Western Europe's energy demand than the public is now officially told.

The crucial point is that nobody knows for certain. Those with the best knowledge the big international concerns like Shell, British Petroleum, Exxon and Mobil-have strong business interests in keeping silent.

But the wide range of estimates and the rapid pace at which the government changes its own forecast-it was predicting only 1 million barrels daily not long ago—says something about government oil policy.

It suggests that crucial political and economic decisions about energy are made by officials no better equipped than a blind-folded man stumbling around a carnival funhouse.

According to informed critics, the government here has belatedly learned or acknowledged these things:

The profits of major companies could escape any taxation in the United Kingdom because they will be offset by the aritifical levies imposed in the Mid

Instead of the stiff exploration program the government thought it had imposed on firms, the companies are drilling at a rate of their own design, and most are behind their own schedules.

Instead of a thorough, independent examination of the companies' exploring experience, the government has relied on a handful of geologists of limited standing. As late as 1972, the agency concerned employed only nine technicians for offshore petroleum licensing.

A leading economist who served as a key adviser to the Department of Trade and Industry, the ministry in charge of energy problems, says:

"I can tell you from my experience that the government does not even know such elementary things as the current stocks of refined products.”

DIFFICULTIES OF DRILLING

Oil company executives and their geologists retort that there is nothing very remarkable about changing and increasing estimates for North Sea oil. To find oil and gas anywhere, they stress, is a risky, costly, uncertain affair.

"You simply don't know what you have until that drill bites in and hits it," says a geologist who once supervised several hundred others geologists in one leading concern.

The North Sea, it is argued, is a particularly chancy and expensive place to look for oil and gas. The deposits lie deep below the surface, as much as 600 feet down. Working conditions are the worst that offshore oil men have encountered anywhere. Stiff gales blow up to 28 knots, and the icy waters and towering waves are far more hazardous than the gentle waves in, say, the Gulf of Mexico.

Optimists' estimates of what the North Sea contains, industry men argue, are based on guesses about areas that have not even been drilled. The chilling waters off Norway above the 62d parallel, the shelf west of the Shetland and Orkney Islands and north of Scotland, the Celtic Sea between Ireland and southern England.

A former civil servant who played a leading role in shaping Britain's North Sea energy policies and is now a consultant to an oil equipment firms says:

"Responsible government must be cautious. Its estimates are necessarily based on the known, not on guesses about the unknown."

An oil financier contend that there are good legal and business reasons for understating finds. "Your Securities and Exchange Commission," he says, "takes a dim view of companies that exaggerate their discoveries and thus promote their shares. Moreover, these firms are still bargaining with governments over the terms of licenses to explore and produce in the North Sea. Some of the richest finds have been along the median line, dividing Britain's shelf from Norway. If the companies disclosed their private estimates, the difficult Norwegian government might fix even harsher terms for the blocks that have not yet been awarded."

"FRONTIERS OF TECHNOLOGY"

The industry scoffs at the suggestion that it has not conducted an all-out search, at least for oil. The hunt, however, is expensive, it says. An exploration well costs $2.5 million to $5 million in the difficult waters. Once oil is found, the capital or investment cost of lifting it out is put at $2,500 for each daily barrel the field will yield, 10 or 15 times as much as on shore.

Above all, the industry complains that it lacks the big and expensive rigs needed to extract the oil as well as the skilled manpower to operate them.

"You are at the frontiers of engineering technology in the North Sea," one executive says. "We are building structures for conditions we have never met before."

Finally, the Department of Trade and Industry is blamed in part for holding up the search and production. The companies acknowledge that the government gave them liberal terms-they can hold on to their North Sea blocks for 46 years and must pay in royalties only 12.5 per cent of the price of oil they find. But the ministry deliberately steers licenses to companies that buy British equipment, and the equipment makers performance here is universally condemned. They are blamed for an unwillingness to design new rigs, failing to meet specifications, delays because of strikes and every other failure of British industry.

The buy-British policy has pushed back oil company schedules as much as 19 months, industry men say.

"We have gone as fast as we can," an expert from one big company contends. "There have been, of course, honest differences of opinion over what the North Sea contains."

Industry men delight in telling how Shell's persistent interest pushed a reluctant and rival Britsh Petroleum into exploring its Forties Field off northern Scotland. A very conservative estimate in London's financial circles now calculates that this field alone will yield from $150 million to $250 million annually in profits after taxes by the end of the 1970s.

THE CRITICS' CASE

Despite this imposing array of oil company and civil servant arguments, there are prominent critics who are unimpressed. They insist that the big companies have deliberately held back on exploiting resources in Europe's backyard and that successive governments have knowlingly or ignorantly abetted them.

One leading skeptic is Peter Odell, an economist who worked for Shell and now directs an institute of economic geography at Erasmus University in Rotterdam.

"Presentations of the scale of Western Europe's oil and gas resources and their production potential are unrealistic," he says, "either through ignorance or deliberate distortion on the part of the vested interests. The ignorance stems from the failure of governments to place necessary obligations on the companies to reveal a comprehensive set of publishable facts on their activities and then to make sure they have adequate numers of staff competent to collate and evaluate the flow of information and so to give valid advice on which to base policy decisions. . . The distorting or withholding of information appears to be the North Sea norm."

Odell points to a study made of 128 oil pools in Alberta, Canada. It shows that estimates of proven reserves increased 880 per cent between the first and 20th year after discovery.

He complains that the major oil companies have underplayed and underexplored the North Sea in order to take as much as possible from the Middle East while the taking is good. In what now may be an exaggerated time span, Odell calls this the companies' "last decade of opportunity" in the Arab world. Thomas Balogh, the Oxford economist who was personal advier to Harold Wilson in Britain's last Labor government and first to disclose the big firms' tax-free bonanza, says much the same thing. He recently told his fellow peers in the House of Lords:

"With their hold on Arab oil steadily weakening, the oil companies, the International giants, planning in the long run, must know that the best way would be to exploit as much as they are allowed of Arab oil and keep as much British oil in reserve as possible."

GAS DOESN'T PAY

Such charges, of course, cannot apply to the independent companies who lack oil holdings elsewhere. The giants like Shell, British Petroleum, Exxon and the others who have the largest share of North Sea blocks, dismiss Odell and Balogh as wild-eyed socialists.

However, some candid company executives concede at least part of the charge, that they are turning their backs on gas. The first North Sea discoveries were gas deposits, but the search for this fuel by the majors abruptly halted when oil was found in 1970.

The companies blame their lack of interest on the diminished prospect of profits from gas. In Britain, they must sell all they find to a single buyer, the government's British Gas Corp. The companies say this puts them at a bargainint disadvantage and that the Gas Corp. has exploited it by offering low prices.

If the companies went after gas vigrously-and they are certain to find some along with the new oil fields they discover-Odell contends that Europe's energy picture could alter sharply.

The standard estimate for 1980, he observes, puts North Sea and other local gas at only 10 percent of Europe's energy demand. He calculates, however,

that indigenous gas could fill 22 per cent of Europe's fuel requirement, and thus considerably reduce the role of oil. He thinks it is reasonable to expect that the North Sea will be yielding 6 million barrels daily at the end of the decade.

If he is right, the basin's gas and oil would provide nearly half of Western Europe's energy. Instead of the conventional estimate that forecasts Europe must import oil to meet nearly two-thirds of its 1980 energy demand, Odell slashes this figure to 33 per cent.

Industry men concede that North Sea gas reserves are likely to turn out well above current estimates, although much smaller than Odell's figure. His forecast for oil, however, is in line with predictions made by some oil men únattached to the major firms.

If Odell is anywhere near the target, Europe's dependence on the Middle East would be reduced drastically.

The lack of official candor about the North Sea is strikingly illustrated by the fuss that Balogh kicked up over taxes.

Parliament's legislative oversight of ministerial agencies is shallow and uninformed compared to the searching spotlight a congressional committee sometimes shines on the executive branch in Washington. But, largely prodded by Balogh and Harold Lever, a knowledgeable Labor MP, a parliamentary committee did take a close look early this year at how much the British treasury would get from the North Sea.

At first, Department of Trade and Industry witnesses asserted that British taxes would cream off half of any company's profits from a large field in full production. Under close questioning, the civil servants conceded that these calculations did not apply to the majors.

The biggest firms enjoy what Sen. Paul Doublas once called a "golden gimmick," far bigger than the much better known depletion allowance. The majors call the bulk of the royalties they pay to Arab states a "tax" and this "tax" is based on a national "posted" price.

These "taxes" are offset, dollar for dollar and pound for pound, against tax liabilities in the United States and the United Kingdom. As a result, in Britain alone, nine big companies have already piled up more than $3 billion in tax "losses" to wipe out levies on future profits from the North Sea.

With characteristic British restraint, the parliamentary committee called this "unsatisfactory." It also regarded as "unsatisfactory" the fact that the ministry could not examine the companies' costs in the North Sea.

In the House of Lords, Balogh was less restrained. The committee's findings, he said, underscore "one of the most scandalous and costly derelictions of duty by ministers and their officials advisers." He called the report "a warning to bureaucrats that their follies would not go unnoticed."

The chancellor of the exchequer, Anthony Barber, has now promised to close the loophole. It becomes bigger every time the price of oil rises or the Arabs increase their take from the national posted price.

The affair is one more example of the fog that hangs over the North Sea's potential. Whatever energy resources do exist in the basin, they are clearly much more than official versions now allow. Policies based on the assumption that Europe must remain indefinitely in thrall to Arab oil may fit the plans of major oil companies. Whether they reflect the facts is a still unanswered question.

Mr. Jackson. Mr. President, I am pleased to cosponsor the Energy Information Act introduced today by the Senator from Wisconsin (Mr. Nelson). The enactment of this legislation is important to our present efforts to solve shortrange energy problems, and is absolutely crucial to our goal of identifying and solving energy-related problems in the future.

In the past months, as many of us struggled to construct a clear picture of the U.S. energy supply system, our almost desperate need for accurate, complete and timely statistical information has been painfully obvious. Severe, short-term shortages are upon us. Government has a tremendous responsibility to see that these shortages are borne equitably and that damage to the economy is minimized.

But in undertaking this task, we in the Congress are at a terrible disadvantage. The gathering of energy information by the Federal Government is in such a chaotic state that is has been possible for industry spokesmen to charge repeatedly that Members of Congress and the executive branch do not under