The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Part of the purpose of our forthcoming travels will be to explore the current reality of this infrastructure, and how it continues to be contested years after oil began to be pumped through it. The term ‘energy corridor’ implies a space of calm orderliness, whereas, in reality, much of the geography covered is scarred by repression and turbulence. During the single year of 2008 there was a near disaster on the oil platforms in the Caspian, and the pipeline was blown up in Turkey and bombed by Russian fighter planes in Georgia. By consigning this infrastructure to a completed past, there is a tacit assumption that its future over the next forty years is assured. However, like so many parts of the oil and gas industry, the future of this Oil Road is highly insecure. Besides the threat of decline in both the supply and demand for oil, it faces the immense challenge of climate change.

  Time is drawing on. Nick and Greg have to hurry off, though not before sending their wishes to friends in the Caucasus – Mayis in Baku, Manana in Tbilisi, and Ferhat in Ardahan. We stay talking for a while with Hannah about all the work that she and colleagues did, coordinating public pressure on various government departments and organising protests, such as the pipeline they built out of cloth, running all the way down Bishopsgate to the headquarters of BP in Finsbury Circus.

  ROCKOLDING, BAVARIA, GERMANY

  It is a busy morning at the Aral petrol station on the outskirts of the village of Rockolding. Trucks and cars come and go on the forecourt, filling up just off Highway 16. We hang around among the racks of sweets, magazines and motor oil, watching the woman at the till serve her customers with routine indifference. Two guys in work dungarees lean on a bar at the back of the room drinking alcohol-free beers. A leaflet at the counter explains that Aral’s parent company, BP, has an initiative called Target Neutral that will help every driver cut back on their carbon dioxide emissions. We buy chocolate and saunter out. The air is damp and filled with the familiar, delicious smell of petrol. An articulated lorry revs its engines as it pulls onto the road, driven forward by the constant rhythm of explosions in its piston chambers. Fumes rise from its exhaust pipe, the geology of elsewhere disappearing into air.

  How does this stuff get to Rockolding? Where does the oil that drives our cars and trucks, planes and factories, come from? How is it transferred from those distant elsewheres to its central position in our lives?

  Just across the road from the petrol station is an industrial estate; beyond it, a line of poplar trees along a ditch and a patch of scrubland. Beneath this ground, a couple of metres down, is the Transalpine Pipeline, a steel tube a metre in diameter, through which pulses a constant flow of black crude oil: 100 per cent of the oil used in Bavaria.

  To the north, above the roofs of the village, are the distant chimneys of the Vohburg Refinery. The pipeline feeds this plant and two others on the outskirts of the city of Ingolstadt, before heading on to refineries at Karlsruhe in Baden-Württemberg, and at Kralupy and Litvinov in the Czech Republic.

  The pipeline has come from the south, running along the valley of the River Ilm from the deep green of the forests of the Hallertau. Mentally tracing the crude in reverse, we know that beyond the limits of our view it has travelled across Bavaria, tunnelled through the Austrian Alps and risen up from north-eastern Italy. The Transalpine pipeline begins at the oil terminal in Muggia, on the outskirts of the city of Trieste. There the white cylinders of the depot overlooking the blue Adriatic are filled with crude pumped from the tankers in the bay. These ships bring oil from countries such as Libya and Algeria, Gabon and Nigeria, but the largest portion of cargoes comes from the Caspian region that was once in the Soviet Union.

  Before docking here, these mammoth vessels have steamed north up the Adriatic through Croatian and Albanian waters, after rounding the Peloponnese and passing the archipelagos of the Greek Aegean. The crude carriers have travelled west along the Turkish Turquoise Coast, from gathering their loads at the oil terminal of Yumurtalik, close to the city of Ceyhan. The tanks of this depot, which mirror those in Muggia, have been filled with oil that has already passed over the high plateaus of eastern Turkey and woven its way through the Caucasus Mountains of Georgia.

  The Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan pipeline starts its journey at the terminal of Sangachal, just south of the city of Baku, on the coast of the Caspian Sea in Azerbaijan. But the crude comes from further east, via an undersea pipeline running from the platforms far offshore, where oil is drawn up from rocks five kilometres below. The BTC pipeline, among the longest in the world, is a machine built to transport Azeri geology westwards across hills and valleys, forests and plains, orchards and fields.

  It takes approximately twenty-two days for the oil to be transported the 5,000 kilometres from beneath the Caspian to Bavaria. It is this Oil Road that has led us through the Caucasus, across the Mediterranean and over the Alps, to the forecourt of the petrol station at Rockolding.

  This route is only one of many that supply fossil fuels to Europe, but it runs along the line of one of the oldest Oil Roads, a pathway of pipe, rail and ship that has carried both crude and kerosene. Over a century ago, oil was transported from Baku across the Transcaucasian Province of the Tsarist Russian Empire to tankers at Batumi on the Black Sea, from where it was shipped to ports such as Fiume. This terminal, now Rijeka in Croatia, was once part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and fuelled its twin capitals of Budapest and Vienna. The profits from the drilling, extraction, refining and transport of oil accrued to companies and families such as the Russian Nobels, the French Rothschilds and the Anglo-Dutch company, Shell. In the nineteenth century, the oil wells and ‘gushers’ of Baku were the subject of international excitement, featuring in news reports and early motion pictures within only five years of the invention of film. An advertising flyer from Baku read:

  On Sunday, August 2, 1898, Alexander Mishon will show some motion pictures that he has taken with a Lumière movie camera. These films of the Caucasus and Central Asia have been prepared for the forthcoming International Paris Exhibition and will be presented only once in Baku at the V. I. Vasilyev-Vyatski Circus Theater. The following films will be shown: Fire resulting from an oil gusher at Bibi-Heybat oil field, the departure ceremony of His Excellency the Amir of Bukhara in the Grand Duke Alexei steamship, a folk dance of the Caucasus, and scenes from the comedy, ‘So, You Got Caught,’ which was performed recently in one of Baku’s parks.1

  These ‘gushers’, produced by a violent collision of technology and nature, made the fortunes of whoever owned the oil leases that were drilled. The crude that was pumped to the metropolises underpinned the making of the ‘Modern Age’. This extraordinary source of energy fuelled Europe’s social visions, wars and political transformations. Our journey along the Oil Road passes through the crucibles of Bolshevism and fascism, Futurism and social democracy, through the furnaces of an industrial continent.

  Raw materials have been carried across every landmass and sea from source to places of manufacture and use for the past 10,000 years. Trade routes have been fundamental since the Neolithic Revolution, and they underpinned cities such as ancient Athens, classical Rome and renaissance Venice. The Oil Road that we travel echoes a medieval route between Asia and Europe, named by a nineteenth-century German scholar as the ‘Silk Road’.

  From the fifth century BCE, Greek mariners were travelling out from the Aegean, through the Bosphorus and into the Black Sea. Exchanging wine and pottery for fish and corn, they established trading posts as far east as Bathys, in the kingdom of Colchis.2 That town is now the city of Batumi, on the coast of Georgia.

  Colchis was the source of the myth of Prometheus. The giant who stole fire from the gods and shared it with humankind was punished for this gift of technology. Zeus bound Prometheus to a rock for eternity and sent a great eagle to feast daily on his liver. Being immortal, the giant’s organs regrew each night, only to be devoured again the following day.

  The rock to which he was chained was at the peak of Mount Kazbegi, the highest mountain in Geo
rgia, which now overlooks the westward-bound Oil Road from Azerbaijan, whose name means ‘the land of fire’.

  Part I THE WELLS

  MAP II WESTERN CASPIAN AND AZERBAIJAN

  1 IT HAS TO BE THE CASPIAN

  0 KM1 – CENTRAL AZERI, ACG, AZERBAIJAN

  Frazer dangles on a rope from the rig high above the steel-blue swell. Below him, three of his six-man team abseil off the platform, checking for corrosion. The strengthening sun makes Frazer’s red overalls tight and irritating. His tattooed arms and back run with sweat. To make the work a little less routine, he gently pulls on the rope of his colleague below, and then lets go. The body beneath jerks suddenly; there is a gasp, and a stream of expletives rises up towards Frazer. He laughs.

  It is shortly after dawn. Activity on the oil platform slowly increases before the real heat of the day. Over 100 kilometres east of Baku, but only 10 from the territorial waters of Turkmenistan, Frazer is at work over the treasure house of Azerbaijan: the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield, known as ACG. A few metres above his head is the 16,000-tonne steel deck of the Central Azeri no. 1 platform, covering an area of several football pitches. Built on top of it are six storeys of utilities and living quarters, piled nearly 30 metres over the sea. The drill tower, like the spire of a cathedral, rises far into the air. Shooting out from the side of the main deck, an arm raised in salute, is the flare stack, burning off the gas, a roaring burst of orange flame, brilliant both in brightest day and darkest night. The fire from beneath the sea.

  Shift follows shift, day in, day out; this mine never rests. The staff on the platform come here from all corners of the globe, flying in to Baku’s Heydar Aliyev International Airport before being shuttled out to Central Azeri by helicopter. This labour force operates a platform that, although in Azeri waters, abides by the habits and culture of the Western oil companies, following practices largely evolved in the North Sea.2 English is the language, and dollars the currency, on this Scots offshore island.

  Central Azeri is one of seven platforms in the ACG oilfield. Looking north-west, Frazer can see the lights of the twin structures of Deep Water Gunashli, ten kilometres away. Between them and him rise the solo towers of Chirag 1 and West Azeri, while away to the south-east lies the lone East Azeri. All but one of these seven mountains of steel were built on a more or less identical model. The one that stands distinct is Chirag, which was partially constructed by the Soviet oil industry in the 1980s and only completed by BP and other Western companies in 1997.

  The main platforms were manufactured in ready-made sections in Norway. They were transported down the Volga Canal by barge and across the Caspian Sea to Azeri rig yards south of Baku. Here the sections were assembled and then towed out to sea, guided to their precise locations by satellites. Each pair of support legs was tipped and lifted by cranes mounted on barges, until they stood upright in 120 metres of water. Seven hundred thousand tonnes of components – gas turbines, valves, cables, pumps and linepipe – were transported here by ship, train, truck and plane. With 3,000 orders from around the world, it was like building a space station in orbit.3 Now complete, these monuments – weathered by the sun and sea – have to be checked by Fraser and ‘his boys’ for rust.

  At the heart of Central Azeri, as with the other platforms, is the drilling unit, from which the drill itself plunges to the floor of the Caspian and then down another five kilometres to the oil-bearing rocks of the Lower Pliocene sandstone layer. Through a complex web of valves on the seabed, the seven platforms operate sixty oil wells in the ACG field, drawing up Azeri Light crude formed between 3.4 and 5.3 million years ago.4

  The hydrocarbons are made from plankton and plants that thrived long before Homo sapiens evolved. These organisms stored the energy of sunlight from the Tertiary period; now their fossilised and compressed remains are penetrated by the drills and, under immense geological pressure, rush up through the risers to the platforms. The oil industry is built on the extraction of these long-dead ecosystems, and the Oil Road is constructed to distribute ancient liquid rocks so that our one species may live beyond the limits of the ecosystems of our times.

  This extraction and distribution of geology is a high-risk process. Oil always comes from the deep mixed with natural gas – known as associated gas – which can be as unpredictable as the sea that thunders against the platform’s legs. Gas can accumulate in the risers in great bursts that strain the steel structure. And it can leak, so that one chance ignition turns a platform into an inferno. Early in the morning of 17 September 2008, the alarms on Central Azeri blared and the air was filled with the thunder of helicopters.5 Sensors had detected a gas leak below the installation, and when workers looked down at the sea they noticed bubbles on the surface. It was a potential disaster. All the 210 personnel were evacuated, and the platform was shut down. Extraction in the ACG field fell from 850,000 barrels of oil per day to 350,000, incurring a daily loss of $50 million in income. How would it have been if the platform had blown, like BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig in the Gulf of Mexico a year and a half later? The spill from that disaster would have covered much of the Caspian.

  As morning work starts on the oil platforms we are standing at the dockside in Baku, squinting at the eastern sea. The view is clear, but Central Azeri is far beyond the horizon.

  We study a map obtained from a former diver on ACG, despite the restrictions on information and data about the oil installations. It shows a demarcated zone, roughly rectangular, approximately forty-two kilometres long by eight kilometres wide. This is the PSA Area, the sea space defined by the 1994 Production Sharing Agreement, promoted as the ‘Contract of the Century’, signed by the Azeri government and the private-sector Azerbaijan International Operating Company led by BP. This is the area of the wells, just over 330 square kilometres of designated industrial zone far out in the wildness of the Caspian. Azeri territory under the control of a foreign oil consortium.

  We have come to Baku by train and bus to start upon the Oil Road from the Caspian to Germany. Many places along the way are familiar from past visits over the last twelve years, but now we want to travel the route in a continuous journey. Our few days in this city will be filled with a round of interviews that will help illustrate how the oil wells at the beginning of this road were sunk in this country.

  It has long been our desire to start with an exploration of the offshore platforms. We have considered it from every angle. But there is no ferry that travels to the area, and to hire a vessel for the130 kilometres out to sea and back would be immensely tricky. Trying to charter a boat would arouse suspicions with the authorities, and we have little doubt that we would be arrested if we approached the platforms. Only those few Azeris employed by the oil companies visit this zone, which is widely understood to be the goldmine of the nation. More than 65 per cent of the country’s oil production comes from here.6

  The Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield is not shown on maps of Azerbaijan. There is no trace of the installations and flares as we search on Google Earth. We have less than thirty photographs of it on our laptop, and all of these are promotional images published by BP. Each one is either a distant photo of a gleaming white platform rising from a calm blue sea, or a closer shot of some unidentified steel structure with men working in orange or red jumpsuits, BP logo on their breasts, wearing white hard hats with an AIOC logo on the crown.7 These are photos from some other place, of clean orderliness, of uniformed men in a machine world. Like images of a space station rather than an oil well.

  Like many places on our journey, the wells lie in a forbidden zone to which only our imaginations can travel. We met Frazer on the train from Baku to Tbilisi a while back, heard his stories of the platforms, and, through careful research, have tried to build the truest picture that we can. We know we will have to do the same for other places on this route, places that impact heavily on the lives of so many people, but are hidden from the world.

  The countries through which we are travelling are portrayed in
books and music, film and websites – they exist in the world’s imagination. Yet the route we are following is obscure. It is described only in technical manuals and industry journals, data logs and government memos.

  The journey along this Oil Road echoes those along the Silk Road. The passage through Central Asia was passed to the Western European mind by the likes of the Venetian merchant, Marco Polo. The fantastical things that he reported fed centuries of debate about the authenticity of his travels. Following in Polo’s footsteps, there are places that we long to visit and yet are beyond the realm of the possible, places of which we have to construct images from the tales of others, such as Frazer.

  So, keen sailors that we are, frustrated at the Baku dockside, we set about describing a journey by boat from the Central Azeri platform to the point where we stand. Tracing our fingers across the map from the diver and a sea chart, we work out the narrative of our passage.

  If we were to sail from beneath the platform, a rising north-easterly wind could drive us west-north-west, and the waves would pick up as we pushed against the prevailing current. After seven kilometres we would cross an invisible line and begin to leave the PSA area. To our starboard we would see the outline of Deepwater Gunashli, the last of the platforms to come onstream, in April 2008.

  Before these platforms could be built, the political, legal and financial conditions for their creation had to be established. From initial meetings in May 1989, it took nineteen years to reach the point when oil was extracted from ACG at the rate that was planned. In the five years after the first meetings, competition for contracts for the oilfield was dominated by a number of businesses, mainly from Britain (BP and Ramco) and the US (Amoco, Unocal and Pennzoil). Eventually the signing of the 1994 ‘Contract of the Century’ brought these actors into the alliance of the Azerbaijan International Operating Company, a consortium of eleven corporations including BP, Amoco, Lukoil of Russia, and the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic (SOCAR).