ABSTRACT
Our endurance strategy was heavily dependent upon building up and then sustaining a high oil burn. To do this we needed an oil procurement programme and preparations for that started about a year before the strike. The first steps were discussions with the government and the oil companies on how the large flow of oil would be established. The lack of government help, the pessimistic predictions of the oil companies and our knowledge of the sheer size of the exercise worried us. The procurement task was ultimately to be even larger than we had expected and to involve the purchase of over 24 000 000 tonnes of oil costing almost £4 billion.
