A fifteen-year Alaskan LNG contract, bought jointly with Tokyo Electric Power (1967)

Finding a competitor to share the volume

Of the 960,000 tonnes a year, Tokyo Gas took only 240,000. The remaining three quarters went to Tokyo Electric Power, the company it fought with over demand for heat and light. Receiving an expensive fuel through facilities on an unprecedented scale, the economics would not stand without aggregating volume — and the core of the decision was that the volume was drawn from a party which at that time owned not one LNG-fired power station. That Anzai Hiroshi went repeatedly to see Kikawada at Tokyo Electric was presumably because he judged the single fact of a power plant rising on the adjacent site to outweigh the competitive relationship.

In the year of the oil shock, nearly half the company’s feedstock was still petroleum-based, and the surge in crude prices worsened its accounts quickly. To speak of LNG as the trump card of resource security is a later tidying-up. Murakami Takeo himself said the demand to solve pollution weighed more heavily than any unease about Middle Eastern oil, and admitted he had never dreamt oil from the Middle East would become so precarious. What pushed the company over the line in 1967 was not a reading of the resource map but the air the people of Tokyo breathed.