Enrico Mattei: From Agip to ENI
The Italian General Petroleum Company (Azienda generale italiana petroli, Agip) was created by Mussolini in 1927 as a public company, with 60% state capital and 20% each by Ina e Inps. Agip was therefore the first attempt by the Italian state to develop a autonomous oil policy.
The company's main purpose was to locate oil fields in the national territory, with the broadest aim of finding solutions to the problem of lack of energy sources, which was certainly one of the factors that slowed down Italy's entry into modern industrial society.
The emblem of that shortage was represented by the coal, a key instrument of the industrial revolution in England, France and Germany, which in Italy was scarce and of poor quality (the petroleum oils present in Sardinia were insufficient in quantitative terms and qualitative, due to the high percentages of sulfur).
For years Italy has had to import it from abroad, at prices that seriously weighed on the public budgets and in general on industrial development of the country.
However, from its constitution until 1940, Agip carried out a notable activity in all fields of the oil industry, in Italy and abroad: heavily invested sums of money in the exploration of oil and methane in Italy and in Libya (Libya was at that time an italian colony). At the time of the entry into the war, Agip boasted a modest production of gas, then considered a contribution to autarchy, while the geological signs of oil fields, considered promising in many locations on the peninsula and in the Sicily, did not lead to interesting discoveries before the second World War.
With the war Agip, in December 1943, was commissioned: commissioner extraordinary was the engineer Carlo Zanmatti, former director of the research division, which had the task of managing the company during the experience of the Italian Social Republic.
Zanmatti was the key man of the war period: in fact it was under his management that the well 1 of Caviaga (1944) was drilled, in the Po Valley, where a few decimetres of sands impregnated with gasoline were found. But given the period, however avoid bombing and do not let it fall into the hands of the Germans, Zanmatti held hidden the discovery. And it was thanks to Zanmatti that Enrico Mattei had the first contact with Agip.
Enrico Mattei was born in 1906 in a small town in the Marche region. Soon he began to work as a painter: a hard experience that Mattei himself defined as “school of work".
The tannery in which he worked failed and Mattei, in 1929, was forced to emigrate to Milan, where he worked in some German chemical industries. Mattei embodies the figure of the young industrialist who came out of nowhere: in 1931 he succeeded to open his first sulfonate factory and in 1933 to found the Industry Chimica Lombarda, a small factory in which paints were produced; was a fruitful period, and in one year the company had about twenty workers. In 1936 Mattei met Marcello Boldrini, his countryman, a great intellectual who will become his teacher of life and culture and who will accompany him throughout all his life. It is Marcello who initiated Enrico Mattei into politics in the milieu of Milanese Catholicism, and thanks to him Mattei had the first contacts with the DC (democracia cristiana, an italian policiaca party).
After 8 September 1943, with Italy split in two and close to civil war, the work in his factory ended; Mattei began to carry out anti-fascist activities and joined the National Liberation Committee of Upper Italy (Comitato di liberazione nazionale dell’Alta Italia, CNLAI) in representation of the DC, with organizational and economic duties; in this period Mattei experienced the first prison experience.
1945 represents a crucial year for the fate of Mattei and Agip.
On 10 April a new board of directors of the company was appointed in Rome, which held a relationship where there was talk of "recollection" and "disinvestment". Italy came out of conflict with a very heavy debt position, and with a strong hostility against the enterprises created by the fascist regime.
On May 15 the Minister of the Treasury of the first Bonomi government, the liberal Marcello Soleri, considering the results of the Agip research decidedly unfavorable, sent to the Ministry of Industry (then run by Giovanni Gronchi) a letter that it required the disinvestment: Soleri thus sought to reduce the public debt of the country liquidating Agip, which received a letter asking it to do so. Agip replied declaring itself in favor, and announcing that it had already created a commission for this purpose. And Enrico Mattei, now well known in the circles politicians for his partisan activity and for his competence in industrialists matters, was appointed liquidator of Agip.
Thus began the era of Mattei. Mattei was quickly informed by Zanmatti about the secret that the Agip carried with it guarded, the discovery of Caviaga, but also of others promising clues that the small group of geologists and geophysicists of the company knew. And the clash over the fate of Agip also opened up.
Obeying the received orders, Mattei began negotiating the sale of the plants of Agip; but from the exchange of ideas with technicians, with mining experts and with the geologists, took great confidence and strove to create a sense of recovery, of hope, of corporate pride. Mattei managed to stop the liquidation, and on 1 September 1945 he entered the Board of Directors. The 31 October assumed one of the two vice presidencies.
This was the scenario in which Mattei began his campaign against demobilization of Agip: as soon as he took office, he analyzed the operational capabilities and potentials of development of the institution, convincing itself that it could be a great resource useful for the country.
Mattei immediately understood that Caviaga was the keystone of the economic and civil recovery of Italy; but to exploit the field it was necessary to drill other wells, starting with Caviaga 2, on which all hopes were based.
To exploit the discovered fields, funding was needed. Agip had no funds and the central administration of Rome denied the funding. Mattei accepted the challenge and threw himself with all his might on the project: he met great bankers and obtained loans by guaranteeing on his own personal assets, so that work could resume. He tried to relaunch Agip's business making use of all possible support: letters to the Prime Minister Ferruccio Parri, to eminent political figures, public statements, articles, and others disdaining the support of Zanmatti (despite the latter having been nominated commissioner from CSR).
The work resumed, the Caviaga 2 probe did not disappoint: the long-awaited methane appeared in quantity. The production capacity of Caviaga 2 attracted the interests of the private initiative, which saw the possibility of substantial income looming (only in this year applications for concessions in the Po Valley were presented to the government by 421 companies, Italian and foreign).
While the post-war regularization of Agip proceeds (the two sections reunited in which the company was divided, the mining in Lodi and Milan, the distribution a Rome), the board of Agip oscillated between the realization of Mattei's policy, which he asked for the relaunch of Agip and the maintenance of oil exploration in one public enterprise, or continue towards the liquidation of the company. Mattei, who encountered very strong hostility within the CDA (consiglio di amministrazione), resigned from vice president on May 9, 1947, remaining a simple councilor.
Mattei was left with only the political "card": he decided to run for elections for the Chamber of Deputies, with the aim of acquiring a strong political position from which influence the events of Agip. Elected deputy in the ranks of the DC, and accomplice there great electoral test of his party, Mattei's theses could be realized.
The Agip knot was resolved immediately: in June 1948 a new CDA was appointed, with Boldrini as president and Mattei as vice: the deadlock was over and Mattei, after various events, gradually established himself as the recognized head of Agip, definitively stabilizing control over the company's management in his favor.
One of the first decisions taken by the new board of directors was the resumption of all mining activities.
In the meantime, the great controversy between the statists and the privatists began. The first, led by Mattei, wanted the exclusive research of the hydrocarbons on the national territory; the latter, private operators supported by multinationals in the sector and liberal political personnel, asked instead the intervention of private industry, domestic and foreign, and orchestrated a tough guy attack against the monopoly of research by Agip. The Cortemaggiore story fits into this uncertain picture: in June of 1949, during a visit by the Minister of Economy Vanoni, that oil gushes out crude that had been waiting for a long time. In reality it was not a large deposit, indeed it was a very small reserve influential in the national energy needs, and moreover it was low oil quality. But the episode caused an uproar and Mattei triumphalistically earned for weeks the front pages of newspapers, leaving public statements in which he spoke of "transformation of the Italian economy" and of the fact that the discovery touched "Big interests", addressing individuals and multinationals who did not want to miss the opportunity.
In the meantime, at the Caviaga well, Ripalta (locality of Cremasco, where in 1948, following studies that were already in an advanced stage, it was discovered a natural gas field) and Cortemaggiore, the new discovery was added metanifera of Cornegliano, demonstrating an intense exploration activity that led to the drilling of about forty oil wells.
Unusual results for an institution that was officially about to be liquidated, but that in reality it recorded an escalation of positive results.
Mattei, on the strength of the propaganda successes derived from the discovery of Italian oil, therefore felt the need to explicitly ask for a law which he entrusted to the government was the task of bringing out the hydrocarbons buried in the Po Valley, and of allocate them for the benefit of all and not just a part of the community. The clash between privatists and statists thus moved to the parliamentary halls, where they did they discussed a series of plans to regulate all the matter; it came as usual Italian compromise: exclusive for the state-owned company in the Po valley, which then it seemed the most promising area; free competition in other areas of the peninsula between private companies and Agip. The idea of creating a super took shape explicitly in the debate entity (Eni, National Hydrocarbons Authority) which should have coordinated all energy policies of the country; the idea made official on 13 July 1951 by On. Segni (On. abbreviation of onorevole), who presented the bill on the institution. Law that came subsequently approved by the Senate on January 21, 1953, the date of its establishment of the Eni.
Mattei was appointed president of Eni, a position he keept until his own disappear, still mysterious, in the accident of 27 October 1962: he was on returning from Catania to Milan and the plane fell in the countryside of Bascapè, a small town in the province of Pavia. In 1953 Mattei was the head of a nascent industrial group, with secured financial and technical resources, which immediately became the engine of economic development of the country. He immediately gave up his parliamentary mandate, which he had always considered instrumental to his goals as a public entrepreneur, and undertook a period of feverish activity, in which in an extremely short time, about nine years, a company was set up with a very rapid development process in the key oil and energy sector. At that time the person Mattei practically disappears to give space to the figure of the entrepreneur, and his own vita identified with that of the company he had been so committed to creating. Among the intuitions of Mattei as an entrepreneur, connected to the events of Agip and Eni, were highlighted:
- the clear awareness of the key role that the availability of sufficiently cheap energy sources to provide incentives industrial action, not only by large companies but also by small ones.
- the fact that Agip did not find oil, but methane gas. Until then only the The United States had made extensive and systematic exploitation of this resource.
Agip became the first European company to work on natural gas, and the Italian economy he exploited all the impulse of an energy source of excellent quality and sold to a price defined mainly by the objective of developing the market. In this sense, the great efforts of Agip in the exploitation of the gas and in the construction of a modern pipeline network: between 1946 and 1950 the Italian gas production increased from 20 to 305 million cubic meters and the network of distribution expanded from 354 to 1266 kilometers between 1949 and 1951.
