The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Passing through Erzurum and Erzincan provinces, the Doğu Ekspresi (Eastern Express) stops at countless village stations with no platforms. Sometimes the train halts in open fields, where the passengers wait patiently to board. At other times we make five-minute stops, but nobody climbs on or off the train. Once, a young boy walks alongside the carriages selling quinces to passengers. Mehmet Ali reaches down from our window to buy a couple. We are already four hours late – did he see us coming, or was he waiting here the whole time?

  As the train moves across the Erzurum plateau, we take turns reading and discussing Nazım Hikmet. Ground-breaking both within Turkish literature and internationally, Hikmet’s poems evoke the romantic beauty of the villages and towns of Anatolia while explicitly confronting political oppression. Hikmet, a lifelong member of the Turkish Communist Party, was imprisoned for over a decade and stripped of his citizenship. Sent into exile, he spent long periods in the Soviet Union, travelling south to Baku and Tbilisi to be closer to his homeland. He believed that harnessing industrialisation to socialism would rescue the toiling poor from poverty. Both his aesthetic and social visions were heavily inspired by Futurism.

  I sat at his deathbed

  He said to read him a poem

  About the sun and the sea

  Nuclear reactors and satellites

  The greatness of humanity2

  Hikmet remained persuaded of the liberating power of technology throughout his life. Fifty years later, many on both the right and the left remain convinced of this kind of modernity as a solution to social, environmental and economic problems. So much of the literature around the BTC pipeline, from within the industry, in governments or the media, sees the project as essentially benefiting human development, and the problems it creates as easily solvable.

  Yet Hikmet believed in the need for a change in power relations. He regarded inequality as the underlying cause of suffering, for which political shifts were the essential primary solution. Technology was merely a tool to be harnessed and put to use by social struggles. The real solution lay in people, not the machine:

  Love clouds, machines, and books

  But people above all.3

  As we read, the railway enters a landscape of steep canyons and narrow gorges. This is the area of Lot B of BTC in Turkey, the second of the three sections of its route between the Caucasus and the Mediterranean. In the distance we catch glimpses of occasional pipeline markers. Opening the back door in the last carriage, we get a better view by hanging off the rear of the train, catching the wind and watching the river we are shadowing. The tracks share the gorge it has cut from the surrounding rock over millennia. Rope bridges span the water, reminding us of Borjomi.

  This little river, jumping and foaming over rapids, is the Firat, the beginning of the Euphrates. It has yet to gather momentum from the rain falling on the mountains of the Taurus, before broadening out and feeding the fertile crescent of Syria and Iraq. We are still very close to the Black Sea, but any crude that leaks from BTC here would drain into the Euphrates, bound towards Fallujah, Basra and the Persian Gulf.

  It is strange to think of these two rivers running in parallel – the first visible, accessible and composed of a substance we ingest daily, the second buried and carrying a liquid most of us have never seen, touched or smelled. Both are very present in the landscape we are travelling through; both cross multiple borders; both cause wars.

  But these two rivers – of water and oil – do not flow peacefully alongside one another. One is slowly choking the other. The mighty Euphrates is drying up. In Syria families flee its drought-stricken valley. In Iraq, the shrinking of the river has decimated farms along its banks and left fishing communities ruined.

  The changes to the Euphrates have many causes, among them the building of hydroelectric dams and irrigation schemes. But alterations in the climate and shifts in rainfall are central – hence the destructive relationship between these two sister rivers. Once burned, the heavy black liquid that flows towards industrial society fills the atmosphere with carbon, helps alter the temperature of the world and assists in the suffocation of the river.

  BTC KP 1,070 – 1,257 KM – HACIBAYRAM, TURKEY

  The train passes south of Hacıbayram, between Erzurum and Erzincan. We examine a photograph of the village taken by a colleague, Greg Muttit, during a visit in the spring of 2003. It shows a man clambering about on the flat roof of a deserted building. Behind him a line of poplar trees are blurred by the breeze of a late afternoon in the uplands. The man was Fazlı Kılıç, the beekeeper. It was a village with many hives and no people.

  Kılıç was born in Hacıbayram. Like those he lived alongside, he worked the fields – pasture for livestock, meadows for hay, and the flowers that feed the bees. Then the Turkish Army came, saying they were looking for Kurdish guerrillas. What followed is not clear, but every single person from the village left their homes, and the buildings were destroyed.

  Those who had lived for so long in Hacıbayram were scattered, some to the gecekondus of Ankara and İstanbul, others to nearby villages and towns. Kılıç settled in Tercan, ten kilometres from Hacıbayram. He travelled back and forth to the deserted village to tend his hives. Sometimes he stayed overnight in the ruins.

  The map we are now using on the train shows that Hacıbayram was in the path of what was then a planned industrial project. The thin black lines on the white paper were spewed out from the belly of a hard drive. This is part of the ‘Social Impact Assessment for the Baku–Ceyhan Pipeline’, produced by Environmental Resources Management (ERM) in London.

  ERM won the contract to conduct this study in May 2000. Sometime in the following eighteen months, a team headed out to consult communities along the proposed pipeline route, to ask them their views and explain the predicted benefits of the planned project.

  The study was published in June 2002. Its careful detail reassured readers in the international banks and government departments in London and Washington that time and attention had been given to the villages and fields. A little ‘T’ is marked by Hacıbayram on the map that we hold. It indicates that the consultation with villagers was carried out here by telephone. But when the study was in progress, the village was in ruins. There were no telephones; nor was there was anyone to answer them.

  On the same afternoon that the photograph was taken, as Kılıç climbed across the roof among the hives, that ‘T’ lay buried in hard drives and CDs in the offices of ERM and BP. It is as though a funnel had sucked in the fields and the hay harvest, the migration and the ruins, and concentrated it into one tiny byte of information. The gentle hum of the bees, the breeze of the late afternoon, was translated into some new language, so that the eyes of those few who read it – glowing on a computer screen – could say ‘yes’.

  CAVENDISH SQUARE, LONDON

  ERM was contracted to conduct the environmental and social impact assessment (ESIA) in Turkey, and the social impact assessment (SIA) in all three countries. These ESIAs and SIAs were both a legal requirement and a mechanism to promote the project. In their job as a consultancy, ERM were intimately involved in every twist and turn of the BTC pipeline project over the years between 2000 and 2004. The company wrote and produced BP-branded leaflets – such as the one left with Mansura Ibishova in Qarabork – and distributed them throughout Azerbaijan in 2001. They had prepared the documents that failed to inform Merabi Vacheishvili and Eleonora Digmelashvili of how close the pipeline would run to the Khrushchevki of Rustavi.

  Months after the photo of Fazlı Kılıç was taken in Hacıbayram, the direct action group, London Rising Tide, visited ERM’s offices in Cavendish Square, one block north of the Christmas bustle on Oxford Street. The campaigners had been closely engaged with the issue of the pipeline for over a year. They conducted a Monday morning surprise ‘impact assessment’ of ERM’s office, handing out questionnaires to all employees and conducting interviews. Three activists occupied Chief Executive Robin Bidwell’s office for five hours an
d hung banners from the windows reading: ‘ERM causes climate change’ and ‘No public money for BP’s Baku–Ceyhan pipeline’.

  The leaflet they handed out to ERM staff explained: ‘Your employer plays a crucial if low-key role in grooming BP’s Baku–Ceyhan pipeline for public investment. We’re in your office today to expose that climate change–inducing role.’

  ERM was part of a cluster of environmental consultancies and public relations agencies working for the BTC project in London. These companies were part of the Carbon Web gathered around BP, like the cluster of engineering groups that built and operated the offshore oilfields in the Caspian, and the cluster of banks and export credit agencies that financed the pipelines. Recognition of how these bodies were interconnected guided direct-action protests across the UK. In February 2003 the top floor of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development on Bishopsgate was occupied. In March the offices of RSK, another consultancy to the pipeline, were temporarily shut down. The same month the International Petroleum Exchange in the City of London was stormed, punches were thrown on the trading floor, and part of the building was closed until the Metropolitan Police arrived. In April, the BP Annual General Meeting was disrupted with stink bombs, and John Browne was heckled during his chief executive’s address.4

  ERM and other companies dismissed these protests as irrelevant. But, like the struggle over Borjomi, they contributed to the pressure on BP during the crucial months around the public banks’ decision on whether to make the loan to BTC. The noise created by all these individuals and groups, from Rising Tide to Mayis’s Centre for Civic Initiatives, from Amnesty International to Manana’s Green Alternative, so changed public perceptions of BTC, that the Financial Times came to describe the project as ‘the world’s most controversial pipeline’.

  BTC KP 1,160 – 1,347 KM – ERZINCAN, TURKEY

  [There is a] city named Arzingan, where there is a manufacture of very fine cotton cloth called bombazines, as well as many other curious fabrics, which it would be tedious to enumerate. It possesses the handsomest and most excellent baths of warm water, issuing from the earth, that are anywhere to be found. Its inhabitants are for the most part native Armenians, but under the dominion of the Tartars.

  The Travels of Marco Polo, 12715

  The train pulls into Erzincan, once one of the most beautiful cities in Anatolia – a stopping point on the trade routes east. Marco Polo told of his visit here on the journey that took him towards the Caspian and beyond. The buildings that he described – the baths of the caravanserai – were destroyed with the rest of the city by an earthquake in 1939, the same year that the railway was completed. Here the routes of the train and pipeline part company. So, with Mehmet Ali, we make our way on foot to the coach station. Since the 1950s and 1960s, when the Turkish Republic began to embrace the USA, a network of highways has bound the country together, supplanting the railways of the Atatürk era.

  Our coach carries us through the suburbs of Erzincan and pulls into the stream of westbound traffic on the E80 highway. We gaze at the passing landscape. Along this main road, fenced-off labour camps were set up, while articulated lorries trucked thousands of tonnes of construction equipment inland from the ports. Upon these fields were stacked forty-foot sections of pipe, like those that we had seen at Rustavi, waiting to be pieced together. Bulldozers cut through forests and scooped up hillsides, waterways were diverted and explosives were used to blast the rock.

  Two years after ERM’s offices were occupied, in 2002, the BTC pipeline became an industrial reality along this road. The line on the map became a continuous trench running parallel with us now – it bypassed Erzurum, ran through Hacıbayram and curved around Erzincan. Digital data turned into physical fact.

  However, during the construction of the project, the engineers who oversaw it found that not everything went according to plan. The design of the pipeline had been drawn up by Bechtel, working for BTC Co. But BOTAŞ, the Turkish state company responsible for laying the pipe, was slipshod in the way it implemented the scheme. Block valves, like the one we had seen outside Hacalli in Azerbaijan, are vital for the safety of the pipeline, as they shut down the onward flow of the oil in the event of a leak. Their position in relation to the gradient of the landscape is crucial. BOTAŞ planned to put many in completely inappropriate locations – some virtually on mountain peaks.6 The pipeline trench was left exposed and open, allowing it to fill up with ‘foreign materials’ like soil and rocks that led to ‘wash-outs’ and the pipe shifting its position in the ground. The procedures supposed to be followed when the route crossed an earthquake fault-line were not implemented – and this in an area renowned for seismic activity, which destroyed the city of Erzincan again in 1983. ‘Safety violations’ occurred at all times, but when engineers on the work sites raised concerns with the BOTAŞ management, they were harassed and intimidated into keeping quiet. Several of those who spoke out were summarily sacked.7

  In the spring of 2004, a fact-finding mission of the international NGOs concerned about the BTC pipeline travelled to this area. Among the group was Greg Muttitt of Platform. While journeying along the E80 highway, Greg realised that engineering problems were rife on the BTC route in Turkey – echoing the issue of the pipeline sealant that had been revealed in Georgia. In order to investigate the matter, he placed a low-key advert in a British expat magazine. It asked any contractors working on BTC who were concerned about the project to get in touch. The response was astounding, and comments poured in: ‘No-one wants this pipeline on their cv. It’s an embarrassment’, read one email.8 ‘People appear to be “parked up” in jobs by their allies and friends, when they are simply not as well qualified as they should be. So-called “experts”, who have just come out of university, are put on the job when they’ve never seen a pipeline before in their lives’, said another.9 And then: ‘Early last year BP served notice on BOTAŞ because they were not performing, but it hasn’t made any difference. Part of the problem is that BP has a vested financial and political interest in the project being delivered on time, which may limit how much it chooses to pressure BOTAŞ.’10 And finally: ‘I don’t have much hope for the future integrity or proper maintenance and operation of [this] pipeline.’11

  Greg spent hours in long phone conversations with oil-workers, checking the details of their accounts to ensure authenticity. To protect their identities and future job prospects, he made their statements anonymous and assigned codenames to each respondent. One of the most detailed accounts came from an engineer named ‘Red Baron’, whose exposure of the culture of mismanagement was reported on the front page of the UK Independent newspaper as revealing ‘an environmental timebomb’.12 After determined pressure from Platform and the Corner House, the issue came before a parliamentary hearing in London, and a Select Committee criticised the Export Credit Guarantee Department for its conduct in financing the pipeline. Things became uncomfortable for David Allwood at his Department office in Canary Wharf.13 But neither BOTAŞ nor BP were held to account, and the violations continued.

  While the symptoms of these failings were evident in BOTAŞ’s incompetence, the root cause lay in the detail of the contract determining construction – or, as the ‘Red Baron’ had described it: BP’s ‘vested financial and political interest in the project being delivered on time’.14 Under the Turnkey Agreement with BTC Co., BOTAŞ committed to construct all 1,076 kilometres of the pipeline in Turkey by 26 May 2005 in return for a lump sum of $1.4 billion. This made BOTAŞ effectively a mega-contractor, responsible for delivering two-thirds of the entire BTC route. According to the Agreement, any overruns in the costs of construction would be covered by the Turkish national budget, as BOTAŞ is a state-owned company. At the time the Agreement was signed, industry journals described it as a ‘financial coup’ for BP, as analysts assessed that the real total cost of construction would probably be $2 billion. Building the pipeline at such a – realistic – cost level could have made the entire project financially unviable. By
persuading BOTAŞ to construct it on the cheap, by a reduction of $600 million, BP made the project acceptable to its finance director, Byron Grote, its shareholders, and the institutions lending the money.

  Rapid cost escalation during the building of infrastructure is a norm in the oil and gas industry: a BP pipeline in Alaska cost ten times its original estimate; Shell budgeted its Sakhalin II offshore project in Russia for $8 billion, but over $26 billion had been invested before it came on-stream.15 Through the Agreement, BP insured itself against such escalation by paying for the pipeline with a lump sum. It also bound BOTAŞ to an unrealistic completion date by determining that a fine of $500,000 would have to be paid for every day the construction went over schedule.16

  These tight time constraints on BOTAŞ created a rush that led to slipshod pipe-laying by subcontractors, and to the safety of their workers being put at risk. As one of the whistleblowers explained, ‘Health, safety and environmental issues were placed in succinct jeopardy in an attempt to meet time constraints.’17 Ironically, shortcuts and engineering mistakes were major factors in BTC being completed a year late and its costs overrunning by $1,400 million.

  But even before the construction was completed, BOTAŞ and BTC Co. were in dispute about who should pay for these overruns. The Turkish minister of energy was understandably unwilling to foot the bill, and arguments over the Agreement have continued down the years. The US embassy in Ankara commented in a leaked cable that ‘despite record high oil prices (and profits), BP has refused to re-negotiate the terms of the contract’.18 By April 2011, BOTAŞ had applied for international arbitration against BTC Co. due to the excessive prices the company was charging for the gas that fuels the pump stations, such as the one we had seen at Posof in the snow.19