They were building oil refineries in Milford Haven in the sixties – the years they would later come to call the ‘Age of Oil.’ It was a time when oil towered astride the center of the world's economy. Everyone everywhere cried for oil, demanded oil, begged, borrowed, paid, and prayed for oil. Governments and fortunes and careers rose and fell on oil. Machines sparked to life, hummed and thrummed and churned and sputtered on oil. Stupendous sums of money circulated in, throughout, and around the slippery stuff – and the health, vitality, and very existence of everything from dusty villages in arid wastelands, to tiny shacks on the spare Texas plains, to skyscrapers, palaces, and the planet's great metropolises, depended upon the endless flow of oil.
The world's thirst was, simply, insatiable.
New technology was finding new oil, hitherto unknown or inaccessible reservoirs of oil, drilling deeper, faster. Across the world, by every means and mechanism possible, oil was moving; by truck, by train, by ship. And the tankers that conveyed the precious substance across the oceans were growing ever-larger by the day, transporting ever-greater quantities, between ever more far-flung locales. The increase in scale was eye-popping. Veritable rivers of crude were being sucked out of the ground, spirited across some vast sea for processing and refining, then across a different vast sea to feed some new starving market. Oil was circulating from one corner of the map to the other, sloshing in the giant bellies of the giant tankers, amid an extravaganza of exploration, testing, financing, drilling, piping, pumping, loading, shipping, off-loading, refining, processing, more piping and more shipping, trucking, storage, and more delivery. At every crossroads, there stood oil, like a mighty colossus, and little Milford – due to a simple fortuity of geography and nothing more - had suddenly become a critical connecting point in oil's labyrinthine journey from deep in the ground beneath landscapes barren and remote, to every nook and cranny of the globe.
And what exactly was this fortuity of geography? How and why had Milford become an indispensable cog in this conveyer-belt of commerce? It was simple, really. Milford Haven was situated along one of the deepest natural estuaries in the world – the Haven, the Milford Waterway, an underwater ravine gouged deep into the southwest extrusion of Pembrokeshire County by ancient geologic forces. And thus, as a natural result of its great depth, combined with its tranquil, protected currents and ease of access, it was as if the Haven had been expressly designed with shiny, state-of-the-art oil refineries in mind, as companies like Esso, BP, Texaco, and Gulf began shopping the world for new sites in the 50's. When the Milford Haven Conservancy Board was established in 1958, therefore, explicitly charged with commercializing the waterway's unique topological attributes, and given civil jurisdiction in the Haven up to the high water mark – well, the stage was set (the pump primed, so to speak) for a new Age of Oil in Pembrokeshire.
Esso played the pioneer, breaking ground on the Haven's first refinery in 1957. Officially opened by the Duke of Edinburgh in a stately ceremony on July 8, 1960, the Esso facility was only the second of its kind to be built in the UK since the war, and boasted an impressive processing capacity of 6,000,000 tons of crude oil every year. Fortunately, the fact that a fire broke out the following day on the inaugural tanker to berth at the site, the Esso Portsmouth, did nothing to dim prospects for the future.
Next in line came BP's terminal and storage depot, completed at Angle Bay in 1961, featuring two marine berths for offloading, and pumping 8,000,000 tons of crude each year through a 62-mile long pipeline to the BP refinery in Llandarcy. Nothing caught fire following the opening ceremony.
Milford was now drawing more attention as a site of choice. In 1963, work commenced on what became the Texaco refinery and marine terminal, occupying 450 acres along the Haven's southern shore, providing five ship berths, and refining 5,000,000 tons of crude per year. Remarks made by the local MP at the opening festivities captured the poignant flutter of hope surrounding this burgeoning new industry: This is the rebirth of Pembrokeshire. I only wish the men who were discharged from Pembroke Dockyard during the dark, depressing days, were here today to see it taking place.
And it wasn’t over yet – there was more to come, and ample opportunities for local political exposition lay ahead. For in 1966, a site along the Haven's northern shore was commissioned for construction of one more refinery – this one to be owned and operated by Gulf Oil, the next-to-last along the entire Haven - and this is where we came into the picture.
Each of these mammoth installations had to be designed and built from the ground up, which required engineers with backgrounds in the oil business. My father, armed with a degree in Petroleum Engineering and 16 years of experience, had recently landed a position as a field engineer for the Bechtel Company, and Bechtel had the contract to build the Gulf refinery – three tanker berths, road and rail tanker facilities, adding 3,000,000 more tons of annual capacity to the Haven's already-swollen refining proportions. In 1966, therefore, from the U.S. via an intermediary stint in London, with a handful of other Americans and a peppering of Canadians and Australians, my family and I arrived to live in this sleepy fishing village by the sea, tucked inconspicuously against the rocky southwest coast of Wales.