Abstract:
Italy's move to broaden its energy sources by emphasising natural gas dates to the 1940s, when efforts were first made to tap into the Po Valley's resources. After his appointment as special commissioner of the Italian petroleum agency Agip to dismantle it, the technical staff of the company persuaded Enrico Mattei that the Po Valley was rich in methane. Despite such an unrealistic assessment of the situation, the idea of exploiting the - scarce - national resources proved to be fundamental in Mattei's plan to create Eni, aka the national hydrocarbons board, and led him to believe that the country should continue to rely on gas, considered as important as oil. Therefore, the technical staff, that is, the employees who dealt with energy issues, have played a key role since the beginning, as they have encouraged the Italian government to focus on methane. Accordingly, this paper seeks to provide an analysis of the contributions made by technical personnel during key stages of Italy's energy diversification process. As a result, Italy has come to depend more on gas resources to meet its national requirements, particularly from the early 1980s onward when it entered into agreements with Algeria and the Soviet Union. The Italian case falls squarely within the framework of the so-called energy geopolitics. Events can now be better reconstructed thanks to a larger number of sources that are now available in Eni and Italian Presidential Archives, as well as the Andreotti papers, held by the Luigi Sturzo Institute in Rome.
