Slippery headline. He doesn't really own the primordial goo, just a cut of whatever income it can throw off.
From Prospect Magazine:
Ever since ancient Rome, the sea, seabed and seashore have been accepted as part of the commons—res communes omnium—belonging to everybody equally, and inalienable as state or private property. The commons as a distinct form of property was taken forward in Magna Carta and the Charter of the Forest of 1217, the twin bedrocks of common law and all democracies.
A commons depends on the “sovereign”—in the UK’s case, the monarchy—acting as steward or trustee, with responsibility for preserving it for generations to come. For more than 650 years, following a ruling by King Edward I in 1299, the monarchy accepted this positive duty, known as the Public Trust Doctrine.
However, in the past 60 years, the monarchy has gradually plundered the blue commons—the seabed around the British Isles—transforming it into nothing less than a rentier capitalist empire. That empire, in the decade since 2013, is thought to have earned the royal family in the region of £193m. The new king, Charles III, who while heir to the throne established a reputation as an environment protector, has inherited and continues to profit from this system.
The evolution began in 1961, two years after the discovery in Dutch waters of large quantities of North Sea gas. The Crown Estate was constituted by an act of parliament to manage the assets belonging to the monarchy, with a mandate to maximise revenue and capital value for the Treasury. As King, Charles is not involved in managing these assets; they are not the monarch’s personal property but “the sovereign’s public estate”, managed by the Crown Estate supposedly in the public interest.
At the time, the Crown had no ownership rights in the sea beyond the lower-tide mark on the seashore. Indeed, in 1951 the Labour foreign secretary, Herbert Morrison, had declared that the sea around Britain was not the property of the state or anybody.
But in 1962, as was revealed much later, the Queen privately told the first commissioner of the Estate—the leader of the board running the corporation’s commercial interests—that she had seen something about “taking over rights on land under the sea”. In fact, the Estate’s legal adviser in 1959 had proposed enshrining in law the extension of Crown lands to the whole of the continental shelf. Other Estate officials advised against trying to extend rights to the seabed, because this would draw attention to the fact that no existing legislation gave such ownership.
However, prompted by the passing of a UN convention that granted states rights to the continental shelves by their shores, and by drilling companies seeking legal clarity on ownership of the seabed in expectation of finding commercial oil and gas reserves, the outgoing Conservative government of Alec Douglas-Home passed the Continental Shelf Act in 1964. It gave the Crown Estate precisely the rights it had earlier refrained from seeking. This granting of ownership to the Crown Estate was a huge enclosure of the commons but did not change the fact that the seabed was still part of the commons. The Crown, and the government as its agent, became the seabed’s steward, responsible for preserving it.
All at sea: the Crown Estate (and in Scotland, the separate Crown Estate Scotland) owns the seabed to 12 nautical miles out. It also holds rights to explore and use natural resources (except oil, coal and gas) and generate renewable power on the UK’s continental shelf © Prospect
As a business, the Crown Estate grew at a modest rate during the following decades, returning all revenue to the Treasury while the monarch received a fixed sum—the annual “civil list”—to pay for royal expenses. The Estate’s marine activities did not include the North Sea oil and gas bonanza, for although the Crown owns the oil and gas found beneath the sea, as beneath the land, their exploitation is managed by the government and its agencies.
In the 1980s, the Thatcher government sold leases on lots in the North Sea to oil companies at ridiculously low prices, taking the revenue as a windfall profit to pay for tax cuts. This was a blatant depletion of the commons, in sharp contrast to Norway’s decision to use its surplus oil and gas revenues to create what is now a mammoth sovereign wealth fund, ensuring benefits flow to both current and future generations.
The next phase came in 2001, when offshore wind energy took off. In a first step, the Crown Estate leased 12 seabed sites of 10 square km each. Three additional rounds saw leases awarded in 2003, 2010 and finally in 2021, when the Crown Estate auctioned six large lots, most of which went to German and French firms. The most recent round included the novel addition that the companies would pay the Crown a ground rent, an annual “option fee”, even before producing any wind energy. It was estimated that this round alone could generate nearly £9bn over 10 years....
....MUCH MORE
Previously on the Crown Estate:Charles III, King Of England, Had Gas
We knew he had wind, or more accurately the Crown Estate has wind*, subsidized no less, but gas is a revelation.....
Queen Elizabeth: Offshore wind farms to generate £100m windfall for Crown Estate
From the Times of London:
The Crown Estate will earn windfall profits of at least £100million a year from Britain's booming offshore renewable energy industry.
The estate, which owns the foreshore and seabed around the UK, has already signed contracts worth tens of millions of pounds with operators of offshore wind farms.
Rents from the siting of wind turbines are only the beginning of a vast new commercial opportunity for the Crown Estate. In addition to a huge expansion in offshore wind power and the development of tidal power, the estate will profit from the laying of subsea cables and an emerging industry in storing carbon captured from coal-fired power stations.
Rob Hastings, the Crown Estate's marine director, said that the group, which manages land and assets owned by the Queen but pays most of its revenues to the Treasury, charges offshore wind operators an annual “rent” of just under 1 per cent of the value of the electricity generated....MORE
Regarding the wind subsidies the Crown Estate is not alone. From The Telegraph, August 2011:
Noblesse Oblige: "The aristocrats cashing in on Britain's wind farm subsidies"
Okay, it's not Oblige, it's more like Noblesse, Score!!!
How beautiful they stand!
Amidst their tall ancestral trees,
O'er all the pleasant land.
The deer across their greensward bound
Thro' shade and sunny gleam,
And the swan glides past them with the sound
Of some rejoicing stream.
Blackwoods Magazine April, 1827
I wish Noel Coward were around to comment:
- The stately homes of England,
- How beautiful they stand,
- To prove the upper classes
- Have still the upper hand.
