ABSTRACT
In the history of the international oil industry the decision to move into the North Sea represented a significant change. At the time the estimated costs of production in the North Sea were perhaps twenty times those in the most favourable areas in the Middle East. Historically, the international oil industry extracted its oil in reasonably congenial political environments. In the United States the major political constraint has been the application of the anti-trust legislation. However, the oil industry has had important political support, and over a long period it enjoyed protection from the world oil market. After the revolution the international oil industry was expelled from the Soviet Union, the other major producer. Together the UK and Norway have developed a new model of resource management, which can be called the North Sea model. Both the North Sea model and the OPEC model were developed as alternatives to the traditional concessionary model practised in the United States.
