The Oil Road
Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London
James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello
First published by Verso 2012
© James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello 2012
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
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Verso
UK: 6 Meard Street, London W1F 0EG
US: 20 Jay Street, Suite 1010, Brooklyn, NY 11201
www.versobooks.com
Verso is the imprint of New Left Books
Epub ISBN-13: 978-1-84467-927-0
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marriott, James.
The oil road : travels from the Caspian to the city / James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-84467-646-0 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-84467-927-0 (ebook)
1. Petroleum industry and trade–Azerbaijan–Baku. 2. Petroleum industry and trade–Europe. 3. Caspian Sea. I. Minio-Paluello, Mika. II. Title.
HD9575.A943B356 2012
338.2’7282094754–dc23
2012019763
Typeset in Minion Pro by Hewer Text UK, ltd, Edinburgh
Printed and bound in the US by Maple Vail
What has its roots in the sea, its trunk in the mountains,
and its branches in the cities?
CONTENTS
Foreword and Acknowledgements
Glossary of Abbreviations
Prologue: The Oil City
PART I: THE WELLS
1 It Has to Be the Caspian
2 You Can See Where the President Gets His Iron Gloves
3 They Alone Can Light for Us the Road to the Promised Land
4 Lots of Empty Skyscrapers That We Can’t Keep Clean
PART II: THE ROAD
5 The Wide Stream of Oil Gushed Over the Greasy Earth
6 If the Pipeline Burns, I’ll Burn with It
7 Schrader’s Instruction Is Paper for the Toilet
8 Do You Have Any Books?
9 Without Having to Amend Local Laws, We Went Above or Around Them by Using a Treaty
10 We Closed It Down to the Media
11 We Live in a Corridor of Violence
12 It Is Ash to the Eyes
13 I Will Stop You, I’ll Smash Your Camera!
14 No-one Wants this Pipeline on Their CV. It’s an Embarrassment
15 The Trench Sides Could Collapse On Top of Children
16 Don’t Sleep – Save Your Sea
PART III: THE SHIP
17 Military Forces Sanitise the Area Ahead of the Merchant Ships
PART IV: THE ROAD
18 They Have Long Arms … Like the Arms of an Octopus
19 The Caspian!
PART V: THE FACTORY
20 This Is the Auschwitz Generation, and There’s No Arguing with Them
21 A Liquid Distilled from a Fossilised Ecosystem
Epilogue: The Oil City
Index
List of Maps
Map I Overview of the Caspian–Bavaria Route
Map II Western Caspian and Azerbaijan
Map III Azerbaijan–Georgia–Turkey
Map IV The Mediterranean
Map V Italy–Austria–Germany
Map VI Ingolstadt
Map VII London
FOREWORD AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Oil Road is a travelogue in pursuit of oil. Rising from the Caspian Sea, we tracked BP’s pipeline westwards over the Caucasus Mountains and Anatolian plateau before it descends to the Turkish coast. As the oil was carried onwards aboard tankers and through further pipes, so our journey continued, across the Mediterranean and the Alps, to Bavaria and London. From the revolutionary Futurism of 1920s Baku to the unblinking capitalism of our city, the drive to control oil reserves – and hence people and events – has shattered nature and shaped societies. The stupendous wealth of Azerbaijani crude has long inspired dreams of a world remade. Thus this book travels through both time and space, exploring a landscape of power, resistance and profit.
While the narrative portrays a particular journey made in 2009, it refers back to stories we gathered on travels made to the places described since 1998. All of the conversations portrayed are based on recordings or notes taken at the time. Very occasionally names have been changed to avoid putting individuals at risk. Several of the main characters in the book have kindly read and checked the final text.
The Oil Road passes through the lands of ten major languages, and we have tried to draw out this richness in the story, using the orthography particular to these languages where possible. Transcribing Azeri, Georgian, Kurdish and Turkish names into English can be challenging, and we apologise for our mistakes and shortcomings.
The pipeline systems that we travel also have their own tongue, conventionally described in the numerical language of engineering. We have used this numbering pattern in the headings of sections that take place directly on the route itself, giving both the length of each pipeline section to that location, its ‘kilometre point’ or ‘KP’, and the distance travelled along the entire Oil Road. Hence a section title such as:
BTC KP 484 – 671 km – Krtsanisi, Georgia
We have used the measurement of the sea, nautical miles, to describe the passage of the tanker. Those locations not directly on the route of the oil – such as Baku itself – are without numbers.
This book would have been impossible without the close collaboration of friends who we worked with over the past decade as Platform and our allies scrutinised and challenged the industrial project and the governments behind it. We would particularly like to thank some remarkable people – brave, skilled and determined: Mayis Gulaliyev, Zardusht Alizade, Manana Kochladze, Kety Gujaraidze, Ferhat Kaya, Ali Kurdoğlu , Mehmet Ali Uslu, Mustafa Gündoğdu, Kerim Yıldız , Elena Gerebizza, Antonio Tricarico, Greg Muttitt, Mark Brown, Nick Hildyard and Hannah Griffiths.
There are many others who have engaged in the issues in the book with perseverance and brilliance, but whom we have been unable to mention in the text, including Mirvari Gahramanli, Rochelle Harris, Petr Hlobil, Martin Skalsky, Yuri Urbansky, Sebastien Godinot, Doug Norlen, Regine Richter, Piotr Trzaskowski, Greig Aitkin, Andrea Baranes, Pippa Gallop, Carol Welch, Karen Decker, Steve Kretzman, Wilimijn Nagel, Paul de Clerk, Clive Wicks, Hannah Ellis, Rachel Bernu, Andy Rowell, Michael Gillard, Nick Rau, Tony Juniper, Foye Hatton, Alexandra Woodsworth, Steve, Catriona Vine, Sally Eberhardt, Andrew Barry, Kate Hampton, Rob Newman, Anke Stock, Mark Thomas, Kate Geary and Anders Lustgarten.
In addition to those mentioned above, we are extremely grateful for the time and assistance given to us during our travels by a number of dedicated individuals, including Arzu Abdullayeva, Mehdi Gulaliyev, Ramazi Lomsadze, Marzia Piron, Simone Libralato, Bruno Lisjak, Rudi Remm, Guy Chazan, Ülkü Güney, Guney Yildiz, Yaprak Yildiz, Can Gündüz, Oktay Ince, ‘Mali’ Mehmet Ali Uzelgun, Idil Soyseckin and Tennur Baş.
We would particularly like to thank the people who live along the route of the pipelines, for inviting us into their homes, trusting us with their stories and sharing their fears and frustrations, despite the repression and the fact that we sound and look like the many others from the cities who brought the pipelines with them. We could only write this book because of the freedom that we – unlike many of the people we met – have to travel, move across borders and access people. The book is also a product of our particular set of privileges, which also frame what we see and experience
and what we don’t.
The research and travel for this book was graciously funded by the Amiel and Melburn Trust and the Charles Stewart Mott Foundation. Early research was funded from a fellowship given by the Environment Foundation awarded by John Elkington. We have also been financially supported by the Arts Council England, the Joseph Rowntree Charitable Trust, the Roddick Foundation and the Sigrid Rausing Trust. We would particularly like to thank Gordon Roddick, Sandra Smithey, Theodoros Chronopoulos and Stephen Pittam for their understanding of the value of this work. We also relied on the patience and support of close allies such as Charlie Kronick and Lorne Stockman.
We are extremely grateful for the encouragement, advice and patience of three editors at Verso – Tom Penn, Dan Hind and Leo Hollis; and to Andrea Scaringella and Helen Sheehan for allowing us to use their photographs, Sophy Newton and the Cotesbach Educational Trust for discovering the Marriott photographs, Elena Gerebizza and Marzia Piron for helping source the image from Muggia, Thames & Hudson for allowing us to reprint the photograph of the Symphony of Factory Sirens, Dominic Latham and Jimmy Edmondson at UHC for producing the Carbon Web diagram, and John Jackson for the excellent maps.
We would especially like to thank our colleagues at Platform, and our trustees, for all their support and for bearing with us over the years: Ben Amunwa, Mel Evans, Anna Galkina, Dan Gretton, Tanya Hawkes, Sarah Legge, Adam Ma’anit, Mark Roberts, Kevin Smith and Jane Trowell, as well as past colleagues including Benjamin Diss, Mehmet Ali Uslu and Greg Muttitt. Neither of us can imagine a better place to work than Platform – an organisation that truly values creativity, political purpose and collaboration.
In the writing of the text we were immeasurably assisted by the support of friends who read, researched and commented on drafts, or listened to us talk for hours about revolutionary labour in 1905 Baku, shipping lanes in the Mediterranean, or the oil texture of London: John de Falbe, Gareth Evans, Anna Galkina, Kelly Bornshlegel, Nick Robins, Dan Gretton, Greg Muttitt, Maddy Evans, Jane Trowell, Ory Rose and Cameron Lee.
This was a collaborative project, and we have benefited from much good advice and support. However, any remaining mistakes or omissions are either ours, or due to the lack of transparency around oil politics.
The politics and struggles described in this book are live, constantly unfolding and expanding in the geography we describe and beyond. As this book goes to print, Ferhat Kaya in Ardahan is facing a prison sentence on charges widely seen as a pretext for punishment of his activism around the pipeline. For updates on Ferhat and other characters in the book, as well as on the future of the Oil Road itself, see theoilroad.com.
GLOSSARY
ACG – Azeri– Chirag–Gunashli oilfield in Caspian
ADR – Azerbaijan Democratic Republic (1918–20)
AIOC – Azerbaijan International Operating Company
AKP – Justice and Development Party (Turkey)
AWP – Adria–Wien Pipeline
BIL – BOTAŞ International Ltd
BNITO – Batumi Oil Refining and Trading Company
BOTAŞ – Turkish State Pipeline Corporation
BTC – Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline
BTC Co. – Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Pipeline Company
CIP – Community Investment Programme
CRBM – Campagna per la Riforma della Banca Mondiale
DEHAP – Democratic People’s Party (Turkey)
DTP – Democratic Society Party (Turkey)
EBRD – European Bank for Reconstruction and Development
ECGD – Export Credit Guarantee Department (now renamed UK Export Finance)
EITI – Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative
ERM – Environmental Resources Management
Expro – Exploration and Production
FCO – Foreign and Commonwealth Office
GOGC – Georgian Oil and Gas Corporation
IKL – Ingolstadt–Kralupy–Litvinov pipeline
IST – Integrated Supply and Trading
METU – Middle East Technical University (Ankara)
MHP – Nationalist Movement Party (Turkey)
MTN – Ministry of National Security (Secret Police of Azerbaijan)
NKVD – People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (Secret Police of Soviet Union)
OECD – Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
OSI – Open Society Institute
PKK – Kurdistan Worker’s Party
RBS – Royal Bank of Scotland
SCP – South Caucasus Gas pipeline
SOCAR – State Oil Company of Azerbaijan Republic
SOFAZ – State Oil Fund of Azerbaijan
SPC 2888 – Speciality Polymer Coatings pipeline coating number 2888
TAL – Transalpine pipeline
USAID – United States Agency for International Development
MAP I: OVERVIEW OF THE CASPIAN–BAVARIA ROUTE
PROLOGUE: THE OIL CITY
OLD BROAD STREET, THE CITY, LONDON
28 January 2009. After several weeks of juggling dates we have finally fixed a meeting with Rory Sullivan, Director of Investor Responsibility at Insight Investment. We have an hour to present our critique of BP’s Canadian tar sands projects and explain why they pose not only environmental and social risks, but financial ones too. It is potentially a matter of concern for institutional investors, for one in six of the equities held by UK pension funds are shares in BP.
We come in from the street of roaring traffic to an atrium of glass and light. The receptionist takes names, issues passes, and ushers us into a beige, windowless room at the centre of the building. Insight is the world’s sixth-largest shareholder in BP, and Rory has been in Socially Responsible Investment for a decade. He is the chair of the United Nations Environment Programme Finance Initiative, so we are keen to influence him.
He appears after a few minutes. He is long-limbed and energetic, with bright blue eyes. Before we begin our presentation, we settle in with a few introductions. Rory interrupts with a touch of impatience: ‘Yeah, yeah, I know Platform. I remember your involvement in the debates over BP and the BTC pipeline . . . it’s finished now . . . it’s a done deal.’
For months after, that comment echoes in our minds. We can recall little else about the meeting except the line: ‘It’s a done deal.’
BUTLERS WHARF, LONDON
We undertook the journey that forms the core of this book the following spring, but we had already travelled to most of these places several times over the previous eleven years. The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline, BTC, has been a highly political piece of industrial infrastructure since its inception. Together with a number of individuals and non-governmental organisations in Azerbaijan, Georgia, Turkey, Italy, Germany, the Czech Republic, England and elsewhere, we have scrutinised and questioned its construction, financing and operation since 2001.
In a café just across the River Thames from the City of London, we meet with three friends involved in that coalition: Hannah Griffiths, who worked at Friends of the Earth; Nick Hildyard of The Corner House; and Greg Muttitt, who was at Platform. Seated outside in the cold sunshine, we look back over the long public campaign around the pipeline and discuss the strands of work that continue. We began our collaboration when rigs were already extracting oil from the Caspian Sea, but at that time the BTC pipeline only existed in engineering plans, legal agreements and financial spreadsheets. Now, eight years on, it has been constructed over the Caucasus Mountains and Anatolian plateau, and it pumps nearly a million barrels of oil a day to the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. From there the crude is shipped by tankers to terminals around the world, much of it to a port in northern Italy and from there through a second, older pipeline across the Alps to refineries in Austria, Germany and the Czech Republic.
From our current position we can now recognise that BTC was already under construction throughout the twelve years prior to the public campaign. Any industrial project of this scale takes
decades to realise and is built in phases, many of them overlapping. It is constructed in politics and law, in public finance and private finance, in engineering design and social-impact studies. Much of this work runs concurrently with the building of oil platforms at sea, and the laying of the pipelines across the steppe and through the forests. Surrounding all of this is the constant construction of what is known in the industry as the ‘social licence to operate’, through actions such as the sponsorship of museums, or the financing of community investment programmes.
Our experience, gained over years of researching BTC, has taught us that such a massive project is not carried out by one company, BP, but rather by a network of bodies, which we have come to call the Carbon Web. Around the oil corporation are gathered institutions that enable it to conduct its business. These include public and private banks, government ministries and military bodies, engineering companies and legal firms, universities and environmental consultants, non-governmental organisations and cultural institutions. All of these make up the Carbon Web that drives forward the extraction, transportation and consumption of fossil fuels. In our attempt to explore and unravel this network, we will not only travel through the landscape of the pipelines, but also investigate the topography of the bodies most responsible for this contemporary Oil Road.
The infrastructure of the oil platforms and the pipelines has immense geopolitical importance. Much of the impetus behind its creation came from the desire in Washington, echoed in London and Brussels, to create an ‘energy corridor’ that would bypass Russian territory, running westwards from the Caspian. The governments in these capitals aim to guarantee the supply of oil and gas to their economies by asserting control over supply routes and ensuring that hydrocarbons enter a global market economy.
In the years before the pipes were laid in the ground, as battle raged over the provision of public finance for the project, BP went to extraordinary lengths to assure all concerned that this pipeline would be different. Unlike oil projects in the previous century, this would be carried out to the highest social and environmental standards. Once completed – to quote their strapline – it would be ‘safe, silent and unseen’. This public relations campaign was largely successful, and helped underpin the sense that the pipeline was ‘a done deal’; that this project, which was supposed to represent a new future, was now the past.
The Oil Road Page 1
