On its completion in 1967, the refinery at Vohburg was owned outright by BP, its construction an expression of the company’s drive to maximise product sales in the German market. Vohburg was one of the five refineries around Ingolstadt built in the five years between 1962 and 1967. Their location illustrates a significant shift in the geography of industrialism.
From the mid-nineteenth century, most industrial plants had been built closest to the point of fuel-extraction. The iron- and steelworks of the Ruhr, South Wales and Pennsylvania were constructed in the shadow of coalmines. Similarly, refineries had often been built close to oilfields. However, the fate of BP’s Abadan plant in Iran dramatically illustrated the risks of location. In the early 1950s the Iranian government challenged decades of foreign exploitation by semi-nationalising not only its oilfields, but also BP’s refinery at Abadan. Oilfields are of course immobile, but as long as the crude can be exported, it can be refined anywhere. Consequently, the Western oil corporations, such as BP, responded to the threat of nationalisation by shifting refineries to places of consumption.
In 1950 BP had shares in four refineries in primarily oil-extracting countries, and ten in primarily oil-consuming countries. Twenty-five years later, the company had no refineries in oil-extracting countries. However, it fully or jointly owned forty-one refineries in oil-consuming countries. This change illustrated a shift in political power, with oil-extracting states no longer turning the bulk of their raw materials into manufactured products before exporting them.
The first delivery destined for passage through the Transalpine pipeline reached Muggia on 13 April 1967, on board the Shell tanker Daphnella. It was a shipment of crude from Iran, from oilfields partly owned by BP. This oil was not refined by Iranian workers in Abadan but, once it had been piped over the Alps, processed by Bavarian workers in Vohburg. This relocation of refining capacity weakened the hands of oil-producing states, and at the same time strengthened the hands of the oil companies. While construction of the refineries did bring a concentration of capital and employment to Bavaria, it also made Germany dependent on foreign oil supply – thereby forcing it further down the Oil Road.
Seven weeks after the Daphnella docked in Italy, the shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, arrived in West Berlin on a state visit to the Federal Republic. At the Berlin Opera House, where the shah and his wife, Empress Farah Diba, attended a performance of Mozart’s Magic Flute, large crowds gathered to protest the brutality of his regime.
In the weeks leading up to his visit, the German press had devoted much coverage to the Federal Republic’s support for the shah’s rule. One journalist, Ulrike Meinhof, had written an ‘Open Letter to Farah Diba’ in the magazine konkret:
You tell us: ‘The summer is very hot in Iran, and like most Persians, I went to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea with my family.’ Like most Persians . . . aren’t you exaggerating? Most Persians are peasants with an annual income of less than 100 dollars. Most Persian women see every other child die of starvation, poverty and disease . . . And do most of those children who work fourteen hours a day making rugs go to the Persian Riviera on the Caspian Sea in summer too?9
As the Iranian entourage arrived at the opera house, protestors shouted ‘Shah charlatan!’ and ‘Murderer!’ After the shah and empress entered the building, the crowd began to disperse, but the police and Iranian Savak secret service members charged forward, swinging their batons. In the ensuing chaos a number of demonstrators were beaten and collapsed. One protester, twenty-six-year-old Benno Ohnesorg, was chased by police and beaten with a truncheon. Then, from a distance of less than half a metre, a detective from the Berlin Political Police shot Ohnesorg in the head. At a gathering of students later that night a young woman, Gudrun Ensslin, crying uncontrollably, declared: ‘This fascist state means to kill us all. We must organise resistance. Violence is the only way to answer violence. This is the Auschwitz generation, and there’s no arguing with them!’
The murder of Ohnesorg ignited a new wave of German radicalism. It catalysed the anarchist 2 June Group, the leftist Revolutionary Cells, and the Red Army Faction, called the ‘Baader–Meinhof Gang’ by the media. This latter included at its core both Gudrun Ensslin and Ulrike Meinhof, the journalist.
Four months later, on 3 October 1967, the first shipment of oil to pass through the Transalpine pipeline arrived at Vohburg – Iranian crude ready for refining. BP, itself majority-owned by the British state, now controlled 50 per cent of the three refineries constructed in the Upper Danube valley. Consequently, these plants – one of the densest concentrations of refining on the planet at the time – were effectively UK government assets and highly strategic pieces of infrastructure. Much of their product was going to the US Army and Air Force, based in US Sector Southern Germany – a military then heavily engaged in the war on Vietnam.
By the late 1960s, a generation of young Germans, alienated from their parents, was in a ferment of desperation – even before the murder of Benno Ohnesorg. Born after the war, they had grown up with elders who refused to speak about their experiences during the Third Reich. Their parents were part of the ‘Auschwitz Generation’, as Gudrun Ensslin had shouted in Berlin. This younger generation was also alienated from the Federal Republic, which had wholeheartedly embraced an American social model, partly to assist the collective amnesia. It was a model not only of Cold War politics, with its arms race and outlawing of the Communist Party in West Germany, but also of a culture of consumerism and technological modernity, of which the vision for Ingolstadt was a prime example. The Factory was becoming a place of struggle.
Six months after the opening of Vohburg, on 2 April 1968, Gudrun Ensslin and Andreas Baader of the Red Army Faction drove from Munich to Frankfurt. Their plan was to carry out the group’s first action against symbols of consumerism – the firebombing of two department stores, Kaufhaus Schneider and Kaufhof. The buildings were burned, but no one was hurt.
On 8 May 1972 President Nixon announced that the US would mine harbours in North Vietnam, so the Red Army Faction determined to respond. Days later, three pipe-bombs wrecked the officers’ mess of the Fifth US Army Corps in Frankfurt. Thirteen soldiers were injured and one killed. Claiming responsibility, the RAF’s communiqué explained: ‘West Germany will no longer be a safe hinterland for the strategists of extermination in Vietnam. They must know that their crimes against the Vietnamese people have made them new and bitter enemies, and there will be nowhere in the world left where they can be safe from the attacks of revolutionary guerrilla units.’10 The group was responding to what it perceived as the hidden violence underlying the Western political and economic system.
Soon these political struggles were targeting the Oil Road itself. Back on the quayside in Muggia, we had asked Fabio the fisherman about the SIOT terminal. He looked up from his nets and said immediately, in broken English, ‘Terrorist organisation September Black’. Paolo Gerebizza, who had worked on the construction of TAL, had also remembered seeing ‘the columns of smoke far off, through the window’. His daughter, Elena, sent us the contemporary front page of the provincial newspaper, Il Piccolo, which read ‘Sea of Fire: Trieste oil pipeline targeted by bombers in the night’.
On 4 August 1972, three oil-storage bunkers at the extensive SIOT tank farm were simultaneously blown up, igniting 140,000 tonnes of crude. The fire burned for four days. Even though the area was crawling with troops – this was a front-line of the Cold War, with Yugoslavia less than a kilometre away – militants had managed to break into the oil-storage site, set up explosives and charges, and escape without capture. The explosion shut down the pipeline, with ripple effects felt at the refineries such as Vohburg and Schwechat, and in corporate offices in Vienna, Bonn, Washington and London.
The Palestinian Black September organisation claimed responsibility, explaining that it had targeted the TAL terminal because it supplied crude to Germany, which had armed and supported both Jordan and Israel in the past. Black September itself was
named for King Hussein’s 1970 military assault on the Palestinian refugee communities in Jordan.
A month later, Ulrike Meinhof of the RAF explained why Palestinian and European anti-imperialists were blowing up infrastructure in Europe, bringing the struggle ‘back to the supplier who provided Hussein’s army with panzers, assault rifles, machine-pistols, and munitions. Back to where everything possible was done – using development aid, oil deals, investments, weapons, and diplomatic relationships – to pit Arab regimes against each other, and to turn all of them against the Palestinian liberation movement.’11
By the early 1970s it was evident that the growing dependency of the social market economies of Western Europe on regions of extraction in the Middle East had brought its own challenges. The political conflict in the periphery was fuelling conflict in the oil-consuming centre, and vice versa. The violence associated with the growth of European economies was fuelling acts of violence by the very generation who were supposedly enjoying the benefits of that growth.
TAL KP 462 – 5,069 KM – NEUSTADT, GERMANY
On a cold, damp morning, the train from the Ingolstadt Hauptbahnhof runs east, out through red-roofed suburbs, underneath the autobahns and electricity pylons, and into the farmland of the Danube river plain. On the half-hour passage through the Factory towards Neustadt, we take our bearings from the red-and-white-striped chimneys of the power stations at Grossmehring and Irsching, and the cluster of silver pipe-work that marks the refinery at Vohburg.
We pass long lines of rail oil tankers. Rudi had explained that much of the refined product is sent to industrial customers along these tracks. A line of fifty-one tankers carrying aviation fuel travels every two days to Munich airport. These clunking wagons are like their counterparts on the Baku–Batumi Railway rattling across the Azeri desert.
At length, beyond the bright green leaves of a copse of silver birch, rise the grey chimneys and towers of our destination, Bayernoil. Dismounting from the train, we catch the scent of crude in the air. Perhaps 40 per cent of the oil refined here comes from beneath the Caspian. At the gates of Neustadt refinery we wait in the entrance cabin while the security guard rings through. We have an appointment with Kirsten Pilgram, head of Öffentlichkeit – literally ‘openness’. Workers coming on or off shift, in blue baseball caps, blue boiler suits and boots with scuffed toecaps, cast us quizzical looks, reinforcing our sense that visitors to this industrial underbelly are rare.
On the waiting room table lies an array of corporate literature, including a brochure proclaiming the refinery’s relationship to the factories and industry around it:
Bayernoil fits smoothly within the chain of key industries in the high-tech location that is Bavaria: automotive, chemical, medical-technical and other industries place Bavaria ahead in Germany and in Europe. The motor of this development and the base for its growth was and is a guaranteed and affordable supply of motor and heating fuel and other mineral oil products.12
Leaving the security cabin, we are confronted by cliffs of steel pipe-work. We are struck by the sheer weight of this thing, rising up from the floodplains: a gargantuan structure, alive with cracking and distillation, settling and separation. It is only four decades old, but its scale conveys a massive permanence.
Immaculately dressed in a white, gold-buttoned blouse, Kirsten brings us into a conference room whose calm cleanliness reminds us of the boardroom at Villa Petrolea in Baku. It is here that the shareholders of Bayernoil might meet, three times a year, to discuss progress and hear future plans. The long table and chrome-and-leather chairs contrast with the heaving megamachine outside. As on every stage of this journey, the raw dirt of the river of liquid geology remains out of sight.
Kirsten is friendly but efficient as she hands us a neat pile of printouts that she has kindly prepared. Talking us through them, she explains how Bayernoil works. The schematic diagram that she lays before us is like a plan for the heart of the Factory. Here are the refineries at Neustadt, Vohburg and Kösching. Here is the TAL pipeline arriving at Lenting ‘from Trieste’ and running ‘to Karlsruhe’ and ‘to Neustadt’. Another, more detailed diagram shows the links between Vohburg, Neustadt and the petrochemical works at Münchsmünster. There are lines in yellow, green, black, pink and purple, each denoting fourteen distinct pipelines, each carrying a different substance – this carries liquid gas, and that ethylene. Pipelines everywhere.
Examining these diagrams and finding our way through Kirsten’s blizzard of statistics, we slowly extract a narrative. As we had already come to understand, shareholdings have shifted back and forth, but for thirty-six of the past forty-five years, BP has held the largest stake in the Bavarian refineries.13 It all bears out the company’s commitment to be a long-term player in the German market, and how important BP has been to the region in the post-war period. Despite this prominence, these German assets – unlike those in Azerbaijan – hardly feature in annual reports issued from BP’s head office in London. Their existence almost never registers in the metropolitan financial media, partly because the sale of refined petrol products generates far less profit than the extraction of crude, and partly because the refining business is not as glamorous as the drama of drilling for oil far out at sea.
Although Kirsten has worked here for decades, her service does not reach as far back as the refinery’s darkest months, during the 1973 Oil Crisis, when the flow of tankers to Muggia and crude through the pipeline temporarily ceased. In a book of nostalgic Ingolstadt images, there is a photo with the jaunty caption: ‘During the Oil Crisis it was possible for the Sunday family outing to be a stroll along the autobahn.’14 The image shows eight characters walking down one of the city’s motorways – utterly devoid of traffic. In this picture, the dreams of Marinetti, Schedl and Khrushchev have ground to a halt.
Beyond the material impact of those few months, when the supply of crude from the Middle East effectively stopped, the Oil Crisis had a long-lasting effect on BP, including changing the ownership structure of the company. The spiral of inflation that arose from the crisis meant that, in 1976, the chancellor of the exchequer, Denis Healey, had to go to the IMF for a £3 billion loan. This was the largest application that had ever made to that body. The price demanded by the IMF was £2.5 billion of cuts in UK public-sector spending, and the disposal of 14.5 per cent of the British government’s shareholding in BP.15
The sale took place the following year, in what was then the world’s largest share offering.16 The whole process was coordinated in two ‘operations rooms’ – one in the Finsbury Circus offices of BP, under the guidance of the company’s financial controller, Quentin Morris; the other in the Moorgate offices of the government broker Mullens & Co., under James’s father, Richard Marriott.17 He worked closely with a number of private banks, the most important being Rothschild.
The share offer was 4.7 times oversubscribed. It not only broke the British government’s hold on BP, but also showed the way for future state privatisations under the coming Thatcher government. By 1977, a decade after TAL and Vohburg had started operating, the financial relationship between BP and the UK government was beginning to alter dramatically. Sixty years after Churchill’s initial investment, the government was forsaking its controlling stake. A new structure of shareholding – dominated by pension funds, insurance companies and banks – was coming into being. Yet despite this shift from public to private shareholding, the British state and this corporation remain intimately entwined, as we saw in their close collaboration in ensuring BP’s advance into Azerbaijan.
A further development stimulated by the Oil Crisis was the growth of a new European political movement. In 1973 ‘ecology’ candidates stood for the first time in elections in France and Britain. The same year a new party was founded in Germany: Die Bauern Congress (the Farmers’ Congress), forerunner of Die Grünen (the Green Party).18 This was a movement committed to radical change, but, in contrast to the strategies of groups such as the Red Army Faction, through parliamentary me
ans. Within six years the Green Party had succeeded in gaining representation in two regional parliaments. Twenty years later, after a long march through the institutions of the state, the party joined the federal coalition government. The Green Party leader, Joschka Fischer, who had once been a member of the 1970s Revolutionary Cells, was appointed German minister of foreign affairs in 1998. He would become the longest-serving post-war foreign minister and take Germany to war for the first time since 1945, at a time when the EU was expanding its influence over energy issues in the Caucasus and the Caspian.
As our meeting is drawing to a close, we ask one last question: ‘What of the future of Neustadt?’ Kirsten shrugs her shoulders. They plan ten to fifteen years ahead. After that, who knows? ‘And what about alternative energy?’ She laughs a little, and says: ‘This is for kindergarten – there is no security with it. But of course, it’s a political question. You should ask the Green Party.’
The train to the centre of Ingolstadt takes us back past the plant of Münchsmünster, to which the ethylene pipeline from Neustadt delivers feedstock for the manufacture of plastic. The factory here was once part-owned by BP, but now belongs to the US corporation Lyondell Bassell, one of the largest plastics producers in Europe. Since the 1930s, and particularly from the 1950s, the plastics industry grew rapidly from the infrastructure of oil refining. In Bavaria this development was concentrated around Ingolstadt and Burghausen. At Münchsmünster a range of products is made, including coatings of pipelines – similar to the substance that caused such consternation over BTC in the Caucasus. It also produces polypropylene resin, Clyrell EC340R, which is marketed as being resistant to low temperatures and ideal for food containers, such as the one-litre tubs in which ice-cream is sold. Clyrell EC340R is trucked from Münchsmünster to plants where the tubs are moulded, and the tubs themselves are then transported to ice-cream factories. Eventually consumers buy their favourite brands and carry them back to their freezers. A litre of Carte D’Or vanilla ice cream bought in London might be cradled in a tub made from crude drawn from the Caspian and refined in Neustadt.
The Oil Road Page 41
