TAL KP 180 – 4,787 KM – FELBERTAUERN TUNNEL
Our next bus takes us plunging through the wall of the Hohe Tauern. We are 1,600 metres above sea level: the highest point on TAL’s journey, and the mountain summit of Reigel is still over 1,000 metres above us. The bus bursts out of the northern side of the mountain, into sunlight. Out of the Osttirol and into the province of Salzburger Land, we follow the pipeline markers down the Felber valley.
The Transalpine pipeline is a system to move crude from Italy through Austria and into Germany. However, just like BTC, it had deep strategic and financial importance for both the US administration and the British government. TAL connected two European Economic Community countries by passing through a third neutral state, Austria. The pipeline also performed an important military function by supplying the refineries in Bavaria, which provided fuel for NATO troops, such as the US Armoured Infantry divisions at Regensburg.
For the British state, the pipeline’s economic significance derived in large part from the government’s role as the majority shareholder in BP. The company owned a controlling stake in TAL, and the Vohburg refinery it would supply. In 1914, on the eve of the war that broke across Europe, Winston Churchill, first lord of the Admiralty, coordinated the British government’s purchase of 50 per cent of the shares of Anglo-Persian Oil Company – later called BP – in order to ensure a secure supply of oil for the Royal Navy. This purchase gave the government the right to appoint two of the company’s non-executive directors, who reported to the chancellor of the Exchequer.6 The intertwining of Anglo-Persian and British foreign policy from that point on would be amply illustrated by the wranglings in the War Cabinet over British intervention in the Caucasus in 1918.
By the late 1960s, the now-renamed BP still functioned almost as a branch of the Foreign Office. John Browne, CEO of BP, described starting his first job, a contract to work in Alaska, as getting ‘posting orders’, as if he were a civil servant.7 The company was unable to take major investment decisions that did not assist the objectives of its largest shareholder, the British government. The combined projects of TAL and the Vohburg refinery required the investment of substantial sums of capital by BP between 1963 and 1967. This had to be sanctioned by the board, with the two Whitehall appointees reporting to Reginald Maudling, the chancellor of the Exchequer in the Conservative government of Sir Alec Douglas-Home.
BP’s decision to invest in refineries and pipelines in Central Europe was a bold strategy driven largely by three men within the company’s executive: Maurice Bridgeman, BP chairman; Maurice Banks, managing director of refineries, engineering and research; and Alaistair Down, managing director of finances. During the 1960s they oversaw a radical expansion of BP’s refining and marketing capacity, opening ten refineries across Europe and another seventeen further afield.8
Each decision to sanction a project, made in the BP board room at Finsbury Circus in London, required an allocation of capital. Between 1960 and 1965, BP’s annual capital expenditure almost doubled, from £109 million to £207 million, with much of the growth occurring in the refining and marketing division.9 The company’s debt ratio climbed to an uncomfortably high level for a business working in politically risky states. Consequently, Down coordinated an issue of ordinary shares in 1966. Following a decision by James Callaghan, chancellor of the Exchequer, the majority of this equity was purchased by Harold Wilson’s Labour government. This increased the British state’s holding in the company to 68 per cent. BP was now effectively a nationalised industry.
The route of BTC would not have been determined without constant support from Bill Clinton’s administration. The route of TAL would not have been agreed without the approval of Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s government. In a neat counterpoint to Khrushchev’s promotion of the Comecon pipelines, Druzhba and Bratsvo, the British exchequer left its mark in these Alpine valleys and villages through its co-financing of the TAL pipeline and its tunnel.
TAL KP 195 – 4,802 KM – MITTERSILL, AUSTRIA
We walk to the edge of the town of Mittersill and the Nationalpark Welten, the Hohe Tauern’s main visitor centre. Recently opened, it is a beautiful piece of postmodern architecture, like the museum at Aguntum. The exhibition inside is elaborate. In the ‘Schatzkammer’ 3-D cinema, the benches shake and judder as images of the landmass of Africa batter into the landmass of Europe, forcing up the ‘rock curtain’ of the Alps. The massive ‘Eagle Flight Panorama’ video sweeps us across the peaks, and we lie back on the recliners in the ‘Alm Summer’ audio installation, listening to the sounds of crickets and cowbells. Much is made of the uniqueness of the Hohe Tauern and its links with other national parks worldwide: Yellowstone, the Serengeti, the Galapagos Islands, Mount Everest.
The displays explain in detail the farming life of the Hohe Tauern, 5,000 years of alm agriculture. The cows and sheep, the Noric horses – still named after the Celts who introduced them – the cheese and speck. The park goes to great lengths to protect and support the remains of this cattle culture – encouraging rare breeds, restraining the penetration of diesel-fuelled mechanisation. In the café, the plastic cartons for the single portions of cream explain that it comes from the Hohe Tauern. In the shop we buy Milka white chocolate bars whose plastic wrappers assure us ‘Garantiert 100% Alpenmilch’: they bear the legend ‘Official sponsor of the Nationalpark Hohe Tauern’.
‘The Caspian!’ cries Ferdinand Rieder, the spokesperson for the national park. He is in his early sixties, dressed young in Joop jeans and a checked shirt, his face a picture of astonishment as we tell him that the oil pumped through TAL is partly from the Caspian. He is amazed that the crude flowing through the mountains comes from so far away. We had hoped that he would inform us about the pipeline, but his lack of knowledge and the fact that he has never enquired into TAL confirm once again how this infrastructure is ignored.
The national park was created in 1981, fourteen years after TAL started pumping, in the same year that Mika was born. On the maps printed for visitors, the pipeline is nowhere to be seen. The park is about 1,000 kilometres long, and 40 kilometres wide at its broadest point; it includes many mountain groups and several glaciers. It is divided into two blocks: the western section is a third of the whole area; the eastern section the other two-thirds. Between them runs a narrow strip of land, cutting the park in half. This, we realise, is the route of the oil pipeline and access roads. But nowhere in the exhibition or the literature is there a reference to the constant flow of crude through the middle of this European Yellowstone. Perhaps we shouldn’t have expected anything different. Somehow we had thought a museum about the environment would include the pipeline in its lens. But in this idealised vision of nature, the Oil Road is rendered invisible.
We ask Ferdinand about the relationship between the park and the pipeline. He says there is none. But didn’t the park come about because of the building of the road tunnel and TAL? No, he replies: it was proposed in the 1970s, in response to plans to build a large hydroelectric plant further up the Salzach valley, and because of the increasing amount of skiing on the glaciers. He further explains that there was a battle to establish the park: there was a demand for the jobs that the power station would bring, and people were concerned that the park would not deliver employment. ‘We had to show that it would create jobs.’
‘Is there ever a conflict between the road and park?’
‘No, the road is not in the park. It helps link the two parts and helps visitors to come. In the first decade there was a traffic problem, with a heavy usage in the summer as Germans and Austrians headed for Italy. But then in the 1980s they built the autobahn running south from Salzburg, passing through Spittal and Villach, bound for Udine.’
The pipeline has been airbrushed out of the local geography. TAL played a part in making the road tunnel possible. And the road also partly made the park possible, bringing the visitors in their cars and coaches, providing the income that employs the staff. Mika’s parents brought their youn
g family here, travelling by car down the E45 from Darmstadt via Munich, with Mika dreaming of catching a glimpse of an eagle or, better yet, a Steinbock. So many imaginations have been inspired by these mountains, they have in themselves driven forward ecological understanding. Perhaps things would have been different if the national park had been created in the early 1960s and the pipeline and road tunnel proposed in the 1980s. The European environmental movement might then have been strong enough to resist this industrial project. Or would the Hohe Tauern have gone the way of the Borjomi National Park, with BTC passing through it?
A caption in the exhibition reads: ‘Should the current warm trend continue then the Hohe Tauern will be largely glacier-free in the course of the century’. We talk with Ferdinand about the impacts of climate change on the Hohe Tauern. He explains that the permafrost is now heavily affected, which threatens the flow of the River Inn and ultimately the entire Danube river system. In Anatolia we had thought about how BTC and the Euphrates were like sisters: now it seems that TAL and the Danube are similarly entwined.
The species of the Hohe Tauern, adjusting to the changing climate, have begun to migrate further up the mountains. The Hohe Tauern’s ecosystem is essentially an island of tundra left over from the Ice Age, surrounded by the ‘sea’ of a temperate bioregion. As the global climate warms, that sea rises, and the species of the tundra climb higher and higher. Eventually those plants and insects, those birds and mammals, will be able to ascend no further, and will become extinct. The entire ecosystem of the Alps, and with it the culture of the alm – millennia of habits and languages, skill and song – will go under, preserved and packaged only in the visitor centre.
TAL KP 250 – 4,857 KM – ROSENHEIM, GERMANY
Our train whistles over the Austrian border, and finally we enter Germany. After World War I, the markets of these two defeated countries were opened up to the business of the victorious powers. The Anglo-Persian Oil Company looked closely at growing demand in the new Weimar Republic, at the same time as it was advancing into the market of fascist Italy and having to accept defeat in Soviet Baku. In 1926 it bought 40 per cent of OLEX, an Austro-Hungarian marketing operation with over 1,000 filling stations. Within four years, its stake had increased to 75 per cent, and it began to promote its products with a trademark shield: the emblem of its marketing arm, British Petroleum. By 1938 the Anglo-Persian Oil Company was the third-largest supplier of fuel to the Third Reich. The company’s sales more than doubled in the five years after Hitler came to power.10 The product that saw the largest increase was aviation spirit: fuel for the growing Luftwaffe.
At the outbreak of World War II, Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil and Anglo- Persian shared 57.8 per cent of the German market. All three companies provided fuel to the Nazi state as it rearmed, re-industrialised and established its structures of terror. There is a statistical likelihood that one of these three supplied fuel for the trucks that transported prisoners to Dachau near Munich after 1933. Though many foreign businesses supported the Nazi state in the 1930s, today the links between oil companies and the Nazi regime are a palpable source of embarrassment. The web-published history of BP Germany is thorough, but leaves a blank between 1932 and 1948.
Like the Soviet Union and Mussolini’s Italy, the Nazi government worked to build a national oil industry to counterbalance the strength of the Western companies. From September 1936, its second Four-Year Plan provided subsidies for research into synthetic fuels, producing gasoline and aviation spirit from coal, of which Germany had a plentiful supply. When war broke out, many of the refineries in the Reich, such as the plant at Schwechat near Vienna, switched to synthetic production. Foreign oil companies had their assets seized. Anglo-Persian was locked out of its second-largest market. If it had not been for the special circumstances of war, and the fact that its competitors were similarly affected, the corporation would have faced a commercial disaster.
TAL KP 270 – 4,877 KM – STEINHÖRING, GERMANY
Beyond the windows of the train are the pine forests and green meadows of Upper Bavaria. The villages and towns look ordered and affluent. We find ourselves talking of the contrast between this sedate world and the hurricane of war that passed through here only two generations ago – tanks in the villages, bombers in the skies, and refugees on the roads. Time hides the violence.
The markers of TAL are clearly visible against the dark mass of the woods. The houses and fields exist within one of the EU’s ‘energy corridors’, like those at Hacalli, Tsikhisdvari, Hasköy or Gölovası. But the contrast between the Caucasus and Bavaria is marked. Here there is no Azeri MTN, no Georgian Ministry of Interior troops, no Jandarma, no NATO sea patrols. Yet this tranquil scene before us depends upon the violence – or the threat of violence – in another stretch of the same ‘corridor’. The more our journey enables us to see these pipelines, tankers and wells as part of one continuous structure, the more the apparent peace before us seems an illusion. Maintenance of this peace on the Oil Road requires a lot of guns.
Between Trieste and here, in the wealthiest regions of the ‘corridor’, we have seen no police presence – no need to guard the billions of dollars of crude that pass beneath the fields. In contrast, those places that are most militarised are those where the population in the ‘corridor’ is poorest, and where it has the least access to fossil fuels – on the Ardahan plateaus, in the mountains around Borjomi. The words of the Colombian writer Hector Abad Gomez come to mind: ‘We are living in a time of violence, and this violence is born out of inequality.’11
Just north of the village of Steinhöring, east of Munich in Upper Bavaria, is a familiar array of four oil-tanks, their white bulk standing out from the green of the crops. This is a key node on the Transalpine pipeline. Here, a pump station redirects some of the crude east, along a sixty-kilometre spur, to a refinery on the German–Austrian border. That refinery is the lynchpin of the ‘Bayerisches Chemiedreieck’, the Bavarian Chemical Triangle, where a series of interconnected factories produce everything from plastics and fertilisers to silicon for solar panels.
The pump station at Steinhöring is of strategic importance to the German economy, but there is no Jandarma base like the one in the snow by the Posof pump station. The violence necessary to bring oil to Bavarian industry is hidden. If there were a Jandarma base at Steinhöring, or bombs on the pipeline, sentiment in this part of the ‘corridor’ might change.
It was a small inn (in Upper Bavaria) . . . we sat on benches tightly packed together. It is impossible now to convey the atmosphere. The worst moment was when at two o’clock in the morning of 1 May, the news of Hitler’s death came through on the radio. I remember it precisely, but I can’t describe the stillness of that instant which lasted . . . for hours. Nobody said anything, but very soon afterwards people started to go outside, first one – then there was a shot. Then another, and yet another. Not a word inside, no other sound except those shots from outside, but one felt that that was all there was, that all of us would have to die. My world was shattered; I couldn’t see any future at all.
The son of Hitler’s secretary, Martin Bormann12
In the last year of World War II, the British, Soviets and Americans were determined that Germany, having initiated two conflicts in the space of twenty-five years, should never again be capable of such action. They committed themselves to obtaining Germany’s unconditional surrender and to dividing it into three – and later four – zones of occupation. Prior to the Yalta Conference, US Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morganthau drafted a plan to convert a defeated Germany into an agricultural economy with a minimum of basic industry – a plan signed off by Churchill and US President Roosevelt. In 1938 Germany had been the largest consumer of petroleum products in Europe, and the second largest in the world. Now, seven years later, the victors of the war planned to reduce it to being an importer of only tractor fuel and kerosene.
When Berlin fell on 2 May 1945, Upper Bavaria, near the Austrian border, was still in German
military hands. This was the last redoubt of the Nazi regime. The landscape to the north was a scene of utter devastation. There was an epidemic of suicides, like that described by Martin Bormann’s son, and not just within the ruling elite. The psychological impact on German society of the war, and the sudden loss of the entire social vision of the Third Reich, was immense. As elsewhere in Europe, Bavaria’s cities and towns had been destroyed by bombing. Germany and Austria’s oil infrastructure was devastated. The refinery at Schwechat had been laid waste by the US Air Force 15th Command, flying out of Foggia in Italy. In the last months of the war Hitler tried to implement a scorched-earth strategy. Albert Speer, Nazi armaments minister, described later how he had been ordered to destroy ‘all the railway systems, the waterways, the whole of the communications system, telephone, telegraph and broadcasting, and all masts, antennas and stocks of spare cable and wireless parts. Equally, all switching and cable diagrams – and drawings which could assist in repairs.’13
By May 1945, along the route that we have been travelling, great swathes of industrialised society lay in ruins. The oil wells in Baku had been abandoned; the pipeline across the Caucasus unearthed; the ports of Rijeka and Trieste bombed. The Reich was a sea of rubble. Germany had arrived at what it now calls ‘Stunde Null’ – Zero Hour.
Part V THE FACTORY
MAP VI INGOLSTADT
20 THIS IS THE AUSCHWITZ GENERATION, AND THERE’S NO ARGUING WITH THEM
TAL KP 435 – 5,042 KM – GEISENFELD, GERMANY
Night at the village of Geisenfeld, up on the Hallertau ridge. The traffic is a constant roar on autobahn E45 between Munich and Regensburg. In the darkness beyond, we can make out the valley of the River Ilm falling away to the Danube plain and, directly north, the lights of the oil refinery at Vohburg. Orange flames of gas flares against the Köschinger forest on the Frankische Alb, the range of hills between us and Nurnberg. There is a glow in the sky to the east from the lights of the Neustadt refinery, and the low clouds to the west are lit from beneath by the glare of another plant at Kösching. The flames call to mind the photographs of the flare on the Central Azeri platform out in the Caspian.
The Oil Road Page 39
