THE NATION'S FUEL

Evening Post, Volume CXIX, Issue 86, 11 April 1935, Page 17

THE NATION'S FUEL

OIL' AND COAL

SIR JOHN CADMAN'S VIEWS

; Sir John Cadman, in an address to the Cardiff Business, .Club on "The Nation's Fuel," said that the number of persons employed in Great Britain in the manufacture, maintenance, and operation of-motor vehicles was estimated at over 1,000,000 (reports "The .Times"). British investment in oil enterprises abroad amounted approximately to £140,000,000. From that investment shareholders in England derived an average income of something pver £10,000,000. The revenue which the National Exchequer derived from .the taxation of oil,- and of the vehicles which consumed it, now amounted to £75,000,000 a year. It had been estimated by a responsible scientific authority that every ton-of motor spirit consumed in Great.. Britairi caused, directly or indirectly, the consumption of one ton of coal. '

:.'■ He suggested,. therefore, that the national interests, of Great Britain in matters of fuel were not restricted solely to coal. He agreed that coal was pre-eminently the national fuel, but they had a national stake in oil as well as in coal.

OIL INDUSTRY.

-►There was a school of thought—or absence of thought—which proclaimed that every misfortune of the coal industry was directly attributable to oil, and that if Great Britain ceased to use imported oil. everything: would again be well with1 coal. The facts did not support that argument. The activities of the oil industry in Great Britain were far from representing encroachments by oil upon the trade or interests of coal. The uses of oil were mostly new, and the mechanisms which consumed oil were themselves new. Moreover, the existence and development of the great .majority of those mechanisms were due to oil alone.

; If imported oil were entirely replaced by products of British coal, the national revenue from the former would, of course, cease. Nevertheless, the Chancellor.of tJie-Exchequer would still require; £42,dOQ,QOO, f and he would have to look elsewhere for the money. Where,would he look? One possibility was the taxation of home-produced fuels to make good the deficit. If that were done, the motor;-using community would Hear the expense of providing revenue, as it did now; and, in addition, it would pay more for its fuel Because the liquid derivatives of coal were more costly than the products of petroleum. - » He thought there was in Great Britain a sphere of activity for coal and a sphere for oil. In some respects these fuels were competitive. In most, however, they were complementary and mutually beneficial. Let them not lose their sense of perspective and above all, in any future changes or developments which they contemplated, let them remember that fuel was vital to^ the national welfare.