Whose self-sufficiency? Energy dependency in Spain from 1939

Depósito de Investigación de la Universidad de Sevilla https://idus.us.es/ This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Elsevier: Camprubí, L. (2019). Whose self-sufficiency? Energy dependency in Spain from 1939. Energy Policy, 125, 227–234. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.enpol.2018.10.058 © 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.. En idUS bajo licencia Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 1 Whose Self-sufficiency? Energy Dependency in Spain from 1939 Lino Camprubi (Universidad de Sevilla) Part of the Energy Dependency Special Issue Abstract After Civil War (1936-1939), economic scarcity and political isolation reduced Spanish energy imports to about 10%. After a decade of stagnation, Spanish economy recovered, industrialized and boomed. Without domestic resources, this process largely depended on foreign imports. This paper analyzes the different actors involved in developing the infrastructural and institutional networks that enabled those imports. While it focuses on the Francoist regime (1939-1975) it is attentive to continuities and changes with respect to prior and, particularly, later periods. The article’s thesis is that, rather than assuming a homogeneous state with a unique strategy, different actors within the administration and in private industry pursued competing strategies and favored different resources–coal, hydropower, oil and nuclear and, later, natural gas and renewable energies. These actors shared a rhetoric of autarky and self-sufficiency, which they then mobilized to build their systems of domestic infrastructures and international connections. Given an increasing dependency on imports, competition between powerful state and private organizations was constantly evolving in response to altering expectations and perceptions of energy vulnerability and scarcity. Transition to democracy in 1978 and access to the EEC in 1985 led to a gradual liberalization, acquisition of infrastructures by foreign companies, and internationalization of 2 Spanish firms. Today’s diversification of imports can be seen as the result not of a unified strategy but of competing alternative strategies. Keywords: history; dependency; self-sufficiency; Spain; Francoism Introduction By European standards, Spain is not a small country in terms of territory and it is a medium-one regarding population. And yet its lack of domestic energy resources, the size of its economy, and its political position outside of the Western European core in the early decades of European integration make it an interesting point of comparison to the other cases studied in this special issue about energy dependency. As the following pages show, many of the strategies followed to counter energy dependency (both by reducing imports and by managing and diversifying them) are similar to those described in the issue’s introduction. Adding to the general research program outlined there, this paper explores national strategy not as a single, unidirectional or top-down set of policies or goals but as the product of a variety of viewpoints, projects and interests, held both by state officials and by private industrialists. I apply that pluralistic view to the dictatorial regime headed by Francisco Franco between 1939 and 1975. Because of the political and economic retooling of the country in that period, it will be the focus of this article–which will nevertheless explore continuities with prior and later periods. The main shift in this time was from near isolation to complete dependency. In the 1940s, Spain imported only about 10% of the energy it consumed–taking into account the large role played at the time by traditional sources of energy (biomass, human, and animal)–a percentage that would rise to about 85% in 1975 and to a 3 staggering 90% by the turn of the century (Muñoz and Rubio, 2015). For the early Francoist regime, import substitution in energy resources was hardly a matter of choice. From 1941 to 1945, the US and Great Britain reduced exports of oil to neutral Franco’s Spain fearing that it could be supplying the Axis. Spain’s high inflation and economic stagnation made it hard to buy what little was made available. As for coal, trade in Europe had almost collapsed during War World II and prizes escalated in the European post-war reconstruction. Spain’s coal imports went down from around 20% of the total demand to less than 1% (Martín and Sudrià, 1987: 555). But national production was not nearly enough to meet demand. And, as the country’s economy industrialized in the 1950s and boomed in the following decade Prados de la Escosura, 2018), demand for energy increased at an average of 7.8% per year. While industrial inefficiency was sometimes blamed, the focus was put on obtaining new sources of energy. From 1950 to 1970, every year the power connected to the grid augmented in a staggering 10% (Gómez Mendoza, Sudrià and Pueyo, 2007: 285). Anxieties about dependency grew together with imports, and the rhetoric of economic independence (autarky) embraced in the first years of the regime enabled certain engineers and administrators to place themselves as the bringers of selfsufficiency (Camprubí, 2014). Even as the reality of increasing imports imposed itself, arguments about self-sufficient were used to foster proposals for alleviating vulnerability. Drawing on an extensive literature on energy in Spain, my main contribution here is analyzing how different actors within the state and private industry pushed for different strategies and resources–with organize the paper’s first four sections around coal, hydroelectric power, oil and nuclear energy–as well as how this was transformed through the years responding to technical and geopolitical. A last section analyzes continuities and changes brought by the transition from 4 dictatorship to democracy and by access the European Economic Community. It tracks how new sources of energy became available, including natural gas, which had been largely neglected in the previous period and never became a major input to the total of Spanish imports (Hayes, 2006). The paper is rooted in a system and infrastructural approach to energy dependency and vulnerability like the one lay out by Per Hösgelius and Arne Kaijser in their introduction to this issue (see also Hughes, 1983; Högselius et al. 2013). First, because of physical and economic interconnections the choice of one resource over the others had wider implications in the organization of the country’s political economy. For instance, the National Institute of Industry sought to promote coal through investment in mines, but also through new regulations on prices and on the heating of public buildings. Second, competition between powerful actors within the dictatorial regime was constantly evolving in response to new challenges and opportunities created by external conditions, in particular to events altering expectations and perceptions of energy dependence, vulnerability and scarcity. Technical possibilities for obtaining and using foreign resources (from ports to refineries and reactors) imposed important constraints and forced engineers to act together with diplomats or even assume diplomatic roles (Pretel and Camprubí, 2018). At this level, wider geopolitical issues came to play, in particular American hegemony. The United States appears below as a key player in oil and nuclear energy, but also in hydropower technical and financial aid. In an age of decolonization and Cold War, American diplomats found a useful ally in the anti-communist and developmentalist Franco regime (Lietdke, 1998). Finally, stressing interconnections and infrastructures enables to detect links beyond political ruptures, including 5 personal, institutional and material continuities (Högselius et al., 2016; Langendijk, 2018). The rise and fall (and rise again) of “national coal” Coal was what kept the Spanish economy moving until 1936, when the Civil War divided the country in two and put a halt to imports. Imported coal went from 10-25% of the total to nearly zero. At first, this was a result of a drop in demand due to the slowdown in the activities of its three main consumers: trains and the merchant navy (which demanded 30% of total production), iron and steel industries (10%) and cement manufacturing (5%). The recovery, however, was rapid and in 1937 coal production in the Francoist part of the country reached 75% of 1935 levels (Martín and Sudrià, 1987: 556). Coal demand escalated short thereafter, particularly for transportation, metal industries and construction (Rosado, 1997: 29-33). But imports did not recover, as the availability of foreign currency was scarce. Actually, the need for foreign currency was so strong that some coal was exported to the UK, were scarcity was slowing reconstruction down (Guirao, 1998; Chick, 1998). The response was a radical shift in policy. In the 1920s and 1930s, government intervention in the sector consisted of protection against international imports by imposing tariffs to make foreign imports unattractive (see other papers in this issue for similar contemporary strategies). The availability of international coal meant that the priority was to keep national prices artificially high to make extraction profitable, which could only be done by secluding external competition. In the 1940s the new Francoist government faced a situation not of overcapacity but of scarcity, and thus the challenge was very different from that of 6 the previous decade: to produce enough coal to keep the economy running while preventing prices from rocketing. The coal sector was privately owned, and this double mandate would have made production unprofitable for private investors if not for the economic and political incentives put in place, ranging from tax regulation for different kinds of coal to the violent control of workers to keep mining labor cheap and abundant (Miguélez, 1976). However, the mandate of increasing production confronted the major difficulty of the relatively poor quality of national coal, which meant that larger quantities needed to be used to produce energy and heat. The hope was that research on how to make the best of this coal would offer a way to consolidate the path to selfsufficiency. This was in line with a major argument linking self-sufficiency with scientific research that private and state-employed engineers mobilized to make themselves central to the Francoist economic policy. While independence was never a reality, as a project it had significant cultural, political, and economic implications. The film “Las aguas bajan negras” (Waters flow down black) depicted the social and territorial changes involved by coal mining in Northern Spain by the mid- 19th century. Based on the 1903 novel by Palacio Valdes Aldea Perdida, the movie version was completely adapted to the 1948 Spanish context. In the book version corrupt politicians sell a pristine land in the northern region of Asturias to greedy industrialists under the passive approval of the local priest. In the movie version, rural aristocrats defend their way of life against incoming geologists and miners: “Water flows down already black, let it go red with my blood for defending the river!” However, the local priest convinces this passionate and traditionalist crowd in the name of progress and nation: Northern Spain must sacrifice the beauty of its landscapes to the nation’s well being. Because without industrial progress, the priest’s 7 speech went, Spain cannot aspire to be politically independent. Without resources for energy, there is no sovereignty. Franco’s victory in the Spanish Civil War in 1939 is often credited to his ability to unite the so-called traditionalists with the more fascist-inspired groups. The outcome is known as National-Catholicism, the official ideology of the regime. While it is often identified with reactionary opposition to scientific and technological advances, this 1948 film points to a different interpretation. As I have argued elsewhere, National-Catholicism was an industrializing ideology (Camprubí, 2014). The nascent Opus Dei and the Jesuits organized engineering education and scientific research in the name of an economically self-sufficient nation, which for them was the only means to attain the political independence necessary for Spain to maintain its alleged Catholic essence. In 1941, The Christian Concept of Autarky, written by the Jesuit priest and mechanical engineer Pérez del Pulgar, was published posthumously (Pérez del Pulgar, 1941). It was a defense of scientific research in the name of selfsufficiency. The argument was geopolitical at heart: autarky was the way for small nations to escape imperial monopolies of raw materials. With examples mostly taken from Nazi Germany, in particular its production of synthetic fuels, this book made it clear that autarky was a scientific and technological endeavor that required the mobilization and transformation of national raw materials (for autarky and research in Nazi Germany and other countries: Saraiva 2016). Chemists and civil, industrial and military engineers took upon themselves the task of import substitution. Most prominent among them was military engineer Juan Antonio Suanzes (1891-1977). He was minister of Industry from 1938 to 1939 and then again from 1944 to 1951, and from 1945 onwards he also led Spanish major institution for applied research. Most importantly for this paper, he drew from a 8 tradition of economic protectionism within the Spanish military - as well as from the example of the Italian Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale - to create the National Institute for Industry (INI) in 1941 (San Román, 1999). The INI will figure prominently in most sections of this chapter as a major player in energy production and imports (and, as we will see, not one without opposition). It was a holding of state-owned companies for which Suanzes secured certain independence from the rest of the administration. And from 1945 onwards, the INI was also heavily involved with most major initiatives regarding research for autarky. In 1943, Suanzes gave a speech on “mining as the basis for industrialization.” In it, he described an “industrializing trilogy” of coal, iron and electricity. Solid and liquid fuels were the “basis of the majority of iron and steel industries, of the transformative industries, and of the chemical industries, all of which affect both the defense of the country and the autarkic development of its economy” (quoted in Martín Aceña and Comín, 1991: 157). Suanzes promoted research on coal production and use through the National Institute for Coal, founded as part of the INI among the “black” rivers of Asturias. Together with the chair of “technical chemistry” at the University of Madrid Antonio Ríus Miró (1890-1973) and chemist and mining engineer professor Francisco Pintado Fe (1914-1971), Suanzes pushed for the creation of an experimental coal plant that could work at an industrial scale. The main goal was to optimize the energy output of the low-grade national coal. Suanzes’ strategy to minimize energy dependency placed an important weight on producing national coal, and technical research was needed to make this coal worthy of the task. But permission to release the foreign currency necessary for the project had to come from the government, not from Suanzes’ INI. The Ministry of Finance only approved the budget in the mid-1950s, when competition from oil was rendering the 15 in North Africa, and a third one in Algeciras in 1967, thus consolidating its role in bunkering at the busy Strait of Gibraltar (Pérez Hernández, 2010). In turn, CAMPSA survived the political change of the Second Republic in 1932 as well as the Civil War - when it was divided into two: the Republican CAMPSA supplied by the Soviets and Rumania and the Nationalist CAMPSA supplied by the American Texaco. During World War II, as was mentioned above, the Seven Sisters (including Franco’s supplier in wartime, Texaco) severely reduced their sells to CAMPSA given its ties to the Francoist regime and thus the fears that it could supply the Nazi war effort (Tortella, 1990: 81-116). The US government decreed a complete oil blockade on two occasions (1942 and early 1944) and put in place tight conditions to trace the final destination of any oil US companies sold in Spain. Other alternatives were virtually closed - the Soviet Union was no longer an option and Germany and Italy needed any oil they could get their hands on. An unsuccessful attempt to counter this blockade was producing synthetic oils at home. With this purpose, Suanzes’ INI created ENCASO in 1942 and appointed Planell as its director. ENCASO soon received about 40% of the total INI’s budget. The goal was to obtain fuel from bituminous shale, first with German and then with American technology (San Román, 1999: 189-226). The first factory entered in operation in Puertollano in 1957, but it was too late for its outputs to matter to the Spanish oil economy – the only American experimental factory left had closed in 1956. Thus, in 1961 the Puertollano factory was converted into an oil refinery (inconveniently placed closer to shale deposits than to ports; San Román y Sudrià, 1996: 1499-1530). The postwar world economic order was built on cheap oil (Mitchell, 2011; Shulman, 2015). Thus, oil became a security concern and diplomatic tool for both 16 large and small countries (Cantoni, 2017; Zulueta, 2018). The United States cancelled its blockade to Spain, but Spanish administrators still had to do much work to surmount political isolation and difficulties in obtaining foreign currency. Spanish oil imports increased at an annual 15% from 1946 to 1959 (Sudrià, 2001). In 1946 Spain imported 50% of its oil from the Royal-Dutch Shell’s refineries in the Antilles, 43% from Venezuela, and 6% from the US. In the mid-1950s, other suppliers entered the picture, particularly from the Arab regions, so that by 1960 dependency on the newly founded OPEP was higher than 80% (Muñoz and Rubio, 2015). Throughout this period, CEPSA imported about 40% of the total through contracts with, among others, Anglo-Iranian (until its closure in the early 1950s), the Swedish cooperative Sveriges Oljekonsumenters Riksforbund and, most importantly, Caltex (Texaco) (Pérez Hernández, 2010). Equally important, CEPSA paired with Total and other multinationals to export the oil it refined in Tenerife and the Strait of Gibraltar. In this situation, CAMPSA’s monopoly was now limited to distribution, which meant that it was the only buyer to these refineries, but was not always involved in obtaining the oil directly from first producers. Of course, the possibility of finding domestic oil was an attractive alternative to the expensive and dangerous dependency on foreign deposits. And, as in the cases of other resources, there were a variety of actors pursuing this kind of policy, which brought different agencies within the state to compete with one another for the fulfillment or their respective autarkic projects. Suanzes mobilized all his political leverage to defeat CAMPSA’s monopoly, which was strongly revised in 1947. ENCASO could now become active in oil prospection, and in 1952 it obtained licenses to do so. It paired with international geological and geophysical prospectors to cover the most promising areas of the national territory (Ballester, 1989). However, 17 no major deposits were discovered. In 1958 further liberalizations were put forward by CAMPSA’s stakeholders and the Ministry of Finance. A decree invited foreign companies to pair with Spanish companies (whether state-owned or private) to prospect for fossil fuels in the Spanish Sahara – today, Western Sahara. From 1959 to 1963, about 20 companies (mostly American) prospected in the area (Anduaga, 2009). They found not much fossil fuels of interest, but brought into the Sahara geophysical instruments and know-how that enabled the Spanish government to relaunch prospection for phosphate initiated in the early 1940s, a project that culminated with one of the major findings in the world (Camprubí, 2015). The bulk of the oil used in Francoist Spain continued to be imported and bought in the international market. Another option to avoid excessive dependency was prospecting abroad. CEPSA initiated the major attempts in the mid-1960s through partnerships with US companies to prospect in Guinea Ecuatorial (still a Spanish colony) and in Iran. The INI, on its part, created Hispanoil in 1965 (with 20% participation of CEPSA). It entered into operation only in 1966 in Kuwait, and its results were rather disappointing (Martín Aceña and Comín, 1991: 394-395). In the meantime, oil continued gaining importance in the total share. While oil supplied a mere 8% of the total primary energy consumption in 1935, the figure rose to 17% in 1953 and to 68% in 1974 (Carreras and Tafunell, 2005: 406-409). By then, oil amounted for 93% of Spanish energy imports in millions of dollars and about ¼ of the country’s total imports (Muñoz and Rubio, 2015). In the electric sector, coal and oil thermal plans combined had increased their output from 939 GWh in 1948 to 5,065 in 1958 and 21,366 in 1968. About half of this energy was supplied by oil, a figure that expanded as more fuel-oil plants were being built (UNESA, 2005: 84). 18 The oil crisis hit this evolving system hard. The years prior to Franco’s death in 1975 were dominated by fears of political instability, which rendered the government unable to confront private industries and exporters. Unlike other countries, no measures were undertaken in Spain to reduce oil imports and, while prices escalated worldwide, the Spanish government subsidized consumption at a great cost (Sudrià, 1995). Consumption went from 39,455 thousand tonnes of oil equivalent (TOE) in 1973 to 47,353 thousand TOE in 1976. Dependency on OPEC exporters started only to be countered from around 1979 in favor of a more diversified pool, including in particular the Soviet Union and later Mexico (Muñoz and Rubio, 2015). However, the strong weight of oil in the Spanish economy continued to increase in the transport sector. In the electric sector it reached a peak of 10 m. TOE in 1976 and only in the 1980s did it recede, helped by the Accelerated Coal Plan and by the boom in nuclear energy (UNESA, 2005: 90-110). Nuclear fuels and American hegemony Spanish officials became interested in nuclear energy after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. As elsewhere, they first linked national sovereignty to the bomb, but soon became aware of its potential as an alternative source of power (Martín Artajo, 1946; de Pablos and José M. Sánchez-Ron, 2001: 101). Moreover, they hoped it would be a national source of power. Deposits of radioactive materials had been recently discovered in Spanish soil, and mining engineers had (wrongly) estimated that Spanish reserves were the fifth world’s richest – a figure the New York Herald Tribune still accepted as late as 1949 (Instituto Geológico y Minero de España, 1946: i-vii). In a period of “universal scarcity”, this was a valuable asset (Helmreich, 1986). 19 Soon, the Spaniards sought to capitalize on it to obtain training by German and Italian physicists. After declaring all deposits a matter of “national security” and establishing a secret Junta de Investigaciones Atómicas, they signed secret agreements with scientists in both countries (Sánchez Ron, 2002; Presas, 2005). As the Junta gradually shifted its attention to generating peaceful power, it eventually became a new competitor for Suanzes, Oriol, and the other players who favored competing resources to fuel the Spanish political economy. In 1951, the Junta was transformed into the Junta de Energía Nuclear (JEN), dependent directly on the government. The Junta was granted the monopoly over uranium deposits and charged with acquiring the technology and know-how needed to manufacture uranium and build an experimental reactor. The physicist and military engineer José María Otero Navascués (1907-1983) soon took charge of the operation. His continuing attempts to establish relationships with geophysicists and nuclear physicists in other countries, as well as Spain’s alleged rich deposits, brought the attention of the US Atomic Energy Comission (AEC). After minor collaborations, the AEC and the JEN signed an agreement in 1953 to help Spain with prospecting (Navascués, 1960; Navascués, 1956). Soon, American help would extend to nuclear reactors in a game of dependency to which I now turn. In 1953 President Eisenhower launched the Atoms for Peace campaign. The early American strategy of secrecy and militarization was abandoned for one of control through commercialization. In the Geneva 1955 Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy the US offered a number of countries reactors at relatively cheap prices. The trick was that American reactors worked only with enriched uranium, and at the time only the US and the USSR had the capacity of enriching. Accepting this technology was accepting a dependency on US fuels. In Europe, 20 responses to this US move varied from France’s alternative program using natural uranium to Italy’s full embrace and abandonment of its own investigations. Otero attempted a middle way (Adamson, Camprubí and Turchetti, 2014). In the context of the 1953 US-Spanish agreements and given the difficulties of building even an experimental reactor, Otero understood that he could not refuse the offer, and in 1957 the JEN signed an agreement with General Electric for the purchase of a nuclear reactor – the plant entered into operation in 1968. A second one soon entered into operation. Most of the investment were made by private electric companies, after Oriol, head of UNESA, had negotiated favorable conditions with the Spanish government (de la Torre and Rubio-Varas, 2015; Rubio-Varas and De la Torre, 2017). Simultaneously, however, the JEN devoted its efforts to “win the battle for Spanish fuel”. By this, Otero meant continuing prospection campaigns and obtaining reactors that would run on natural uranium. In 1958 Otero argued that natural uranium would grant Spain cheaper energy in the long run and enable it to depend only on national resources (Navascués, 1958: 34). That same year, the JEN inaugurated a uranium treatment plant and a small experimental reactor that used natural uranium. The idea was to counter dependency on US reactors and uranium by adopting the French nuclear reactor, which did not depend on enriched uranium. The French Commissariat a l’Énergie Atomique was at the time trying to turn natural uranium from a military asset into a tradable commodity as well as to compete with the US in the international market of reactors (Navascués, 1958). In 1963 the two countries signed an agreement for building a nuclear plant – Vandellós I - with a French reactor that would run on natural uranium (de Pablos, 2012). The paradox was that, although Spain was extracting and manufacturing natural uranium in small quantities, this plant would use French uranium. The plant entered into operation in 1972. By then, the US 21 control of enriched uranium in the Western was coming to an end as different countries built their own enriching plants, and availability brought prices down (Nuclear Energy Agency, 2006). The Spanish private electric companies unified by Oriol in UNESA refused to invest in the French system, and Otero’s dream of national reactors fueled by national uranium was finally abandoned in favor of importing turnkey American reactors. Nuclear fuel and supplies thus remained heavily dependent on imports, first from the US, then from France, and later from Germany as well (Muñoz and Rubio, 2015). In 1973, the three existing Spanish nuclear plants were producing 6,545 GWh, a little less than 5% of the total electric output. The oil crisis, together with a US campaign to market its nuclear products, gave UNESA and the government the opportunity to plan for important increases. Arguing against oil-dependency, the promoters of nuclear energy adapted the rhetoric of self-sufficiency arguing that nuclear dependency on purchased uranium and foreign reactors was only temporary until Spain gained the necessary know-how. Between 1971 and 1976 construction began in seven plants and Spain became the world’s major client of US nuclear technology (de la Torre and Rubio, 2015). Although not all of them were finished, due to increasing opposition to nuclear energy from different sectors, between 1980 and 1986 five reactors were connected to the grid with a total power of 4,500 MW. Unfortunately, this was the result of overestimating demand and underestimating costs, so that the entire sector tricked itself into overcapacity and debt. The transition to democracy: continuities and ruptures 22 Each resource discussed so far worked within a complex system of mines, dams, turbines, pipes, wires, port infrastructures, unpaid loans, consortiums, legal documents, factories, consumers, and diplomatic relationships. A change of regimes did not overturn all that. The Spanish political economy did not alter its trajectory after the new 1978 Constitution was adopted, and most of the interest groups struggling for the control of the Spanish energy sector retained their economic and often political power. However, the outcome varied from one resource to the next. Regarding hydropower and oil, most of the assumptions and goals of the dictatorial period continued unaltered. In the case of coal, the above-mentioned Accelerated Coal Plan reiterated early Francoist policies that had been abandoned in late Francoism. In the case of nuclear policy, new policies directly opposed previous trends: confronted with debt and overcapacity and with a now lively and increasingly anti-nuclear public opinion (including ETA’s assassination of two nuclear engineers), the Socialist government elected in 1983 approved a moratorium on nuclear energy. This halted new constructions, although did not stop those which were nearly completed, so that nuclear energy soon reached above 20% of the total electric energy produced. That same year, the government nationalized the electric grid (51% of it became stateowned), partly as a covert bailout of the electrical companies haunted by debt (UNESA, 2005: 118). A second significant political change came with Spain’s integration into the European Economic Community in 1985. The EEC anti-monopoly laws forced a revision of CAMPSA’s position, which had emerged with the explicit goal of establishing a state monopoly over distribution. Although private refineries and importers like CEPSA had flourished, the state bought all their products and redistributed them among different providers at a fixed price. But new European 23 legislation against monopolies demanded liberalization. CAMPSA, for instance, was forced to offer 49% of its holdings to private capital. The state started a process of privatization of its companies in the energy sector. The first step was concentrating all state-owned companies in the oil and gas sectors into a single company, Repsol, founded in 1987. Then, and in line with the anti-monopoly law, Repsol was opened to the participation of national and foreign companies (the Mexican Pemex soon became an important stakeholder). In the 1990s imports and prices were completely liberalized and the government limited itself to taxation and control of maximum prices and to regulating against excessive dependency on a single source. About 30% of all the energy consumed in Spain since then comes from oil, and most of it is imported, but sources are diversified. As of 2012, 15% came from Mexico, 14% from Nigeria, 14% from the Russian Federation, 13% from Saudi Arabia, 9% from Iraq, and the remaining 35% from other countries (International Energy Agency, 2014: 409). With the monopoly dismantled, Repsol became just one company among many, if by far the most important. In 1995 79% of Repsol’s capital was already in the hands of private companies, national and international, and in 1997 the process of privatization had been completed (Comisión Nacional de la Energía, 2006). As the company grew larger and a larger number of international companies acquired shares in it, Repsol entered the international market as a seller of refined oil and a prospector, particularly in Latin America. In time, a company that had emerged to fight the presence of foreign interest at home came to be perceived abroad as a potential threat to national sovereignty. At least that was the argument employed by the Argentinian government in 2012, when it announced the forced nationalization of Repsol’s Argentinian branch. 24 Other domains of the Spanish energy sector also experienced concentration and privatization. The more than 20 companies that composed UNESA at its creation were by the 1990s united into five large groups. And as in the case of oil, prices and distribution would soon be liberalized. As for state-owned producers of hydropower, the INI’s ENDESA unified all of them in 1983. ENDESA then underwent a process of privatization which culminated in the year 2000. And, as with Repsol, its presence in Spanish speaking America grew strong. Only five years later, Spanish, German and Italian companies initiated a battle over its control which resulted in the Italian ENEL acquiring all its stocks in 2009. The battle for energy independency was thus abandoned in favor of liberalization and the opening up to multinational capital (Bueno, 2010: 351-365). Another example of that process is recent negotiations with an Australian company to mine uranium in one of the regions in which it was first discovered in the mid-1940s. As in other countries, Spanish legislators struggled between energetic and environmental sovereignty, international regulation and economic interests (Swanepoel, 2015). A third important development came with the raise in significance of alternative energy resources. Laws of 1980 and 1986 recognized the growing importance of, respectively, renewable energies and natural gas. UNESA had started research in solar and wind energy in the late 1970s and in 1980 a government degree declared that 0,3% of all revenues coming from electricity be devoted to this research (UNESA, 2005: 69). Along the same lines of the Accelerated Coal Plan approved one year before, the explicit goal was to reduce dependency on oil (Ley de Conservación de la Energía 88/1980). The argument for reducing vulnerability to foreign resources was also mobilized by supporters of renewable energy alongside with environmental considerations (Fernández and Muñoz, 2011). In 1990 the government introduced 31 Lietdke, B. N. 1998. Embracing a Dictatorship. US Relations with Spain, 1945-1953. London: MacMillan Press. Martín Aceña, P. and Comín, F. 1991. INI: 50 años de industrialización en España. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe. Martín, C. y Sudriá C. 1987. El carbón en España 1770-1961. Madrid: Turner. Martín Artajo, J. I. 1946. La energía atómica: sus características y su aplicación para fines militares. 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