14 August 2005
The opportunity for the Madras to dock in the Jebel Ali Port comes at sunrise. Dubai’s new harbour, which was created to cater to huge cargo ships, is the largest port in the Middle East. Due to the enormous size of oil tankers however, oil shipments have to be exchanged outside of the main harbour. At about 8:00am in the morning the Madras enters the filling station. Three massive hoses are lowered by crane onto the deck of the ship and positioned so that the crude oil can be pumped into the ship’s storage tanks. It takes well over a day for the tanker to be filled.
While this is happening, Sadek, an immigrant from India, is finishing breakfast with his housemates in a simple apartment on the outskirts of Dubai. Sadek and his friends are part of the foreign workforce that make up more than three quarters of Dubai’s population, and who undertake almost all of the manual labour in the city. Immigrants like Sadek work on oil rigs and on building sites, they cook and wait on tables in restaurants, and they work in the homes of some of the wealthiest people in Dubai. They take care of private and public gardens, clean the streets and drive taxis. These workers earn around £100 to £120 pounds a month. They send most of this money home to their families, who must survive on this source of income alone. Immigrant workers can often earn more than double the wages they could in their homeland working as skyscraper construction managers, vets on camel farms or engineers on the drilling platforms.
Sadek, however, earns his money by loading and unloading small boats in the old port. The old port is situated in an estuary that extends almost ten kilometres into the heart of Dubai. The estuary has served as a natural harbour for centuries, and throughout this time the dhows, the traditional wooden boats of the Arabian Gulf, have anchored here. Forty years ago Dubai was just a small trading post. Only a few of the houses were made of stone, and most were built from clay and had roofs made of palm fronds. Although the town has changed completely in the last few decades, the dhows still transport almost all trade goods in the Persian Gulf, including car tyres, non-perishable goods and electrical supplies from the Far East. While Sadek and his colleagues move crate after crate onto land in the heat, an Arabian dhow captain watches and grumbles to himself. But the dock-workers are happy because the port is busy. Sometimes they have to sit for hours in the shade waiting for boats to come in.
When Captain van der Valt first sailed a ship to Dubai in 1990, the eight-lane Sheikh Zayed road which runs parallel to the coast had just been built. Many foreigners mocked the so-called ‘Grand Boulevard of Dubai’, as the road ran through undeveloped wasteland. Now however, the highway is surrounded by high-rise offices, hotels and apartment complexes. Construction goes on uninterrupted day and night. Today in Dubai, over 200 skyscrapers have been built, surpassing the number in Hong Kong and New York City. Only the smaller high-rises are simple in design and construction. The large skyscrapers revel in how elaborate and complicated they are; the luxury Burj al-Arab Hotel for example, looks like an upturned ship, while the Jumeirah Beach Hotel looks like an enormous slide. These buildings, however, pale in comparison to the Burj Khalifa. It is currently the tallest structure in the world, measuring 829.84 metres high. The Burj Khalifa has 160 floors, with a hotel at the bottom, a viewing platform at the top, and offices and luxury apartments in the middle.
The ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’: Dubai
Dubai is one of seven small sheikhdoms in the middle of the Persian Gulf, which together make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE or Emirates, for short). The country is hailed as the ‘Miracle of the Persian Gulf’. While bloody conflicts raged on around it, Dubai became an oasis of peace and economic growth, where people from different races and religions could live side by side. Thanks to its rich oil supplies and shrewd economic policy, Dubai has become one of the ‘winners’ of globalisation. It is, per person, one of the richest countries in the world. In order to show the world just how rich the Emirates are, they have built the highest skyscrapers, the largest man-made islands, and are in the process of building the world’s largest theme park (Dubailand).
Despite its wealth however, three quarters of Dubai’s population are not actually made up of citizens of the United Arab Emirates, but poorly paid immigrants with temporary work permits.
What the Emirates lack, however, is a good supply of natural drinking water. In spite of this, they use more than a million cubic metres of water a day. Only the USA and Canada use more water per person per day. The UAE’s fresh water supply comes from desalination plants, which are powered by locally sourced natural gas and petroleum. The Arabians in the Gulf still have plenty of these fossil fuels available, but they will, eventually, run out. This is the reason why the government sees the country’s future in trade, finance, retail and tourism. Hotels and parks attract tourists, and man-made islands, luxury apartments and docks for private yachts attract wealthy immigrants. In addition to expanding the country’s aeroplane fleet, the government is also building two new airport terminals, one for passengers and one for cargo.
14 August 2005
By the evening, the Madras is only a third full. The filling process takes between 36 and 40 hours. A tanker like the Madras can hold around a million barrels of crude oil – that’s around 159 million litres. The loading and unloading of the six tanks inside the ship is coordinated by Portuguese first mate and boarding engineer, Raul. A warning system of sensors controlled by a high-tech computer program makes sure that the tanks are filled evenly. If one section becomes overloaded, the hull could buckle like an empty shoebox.
During the filling process, the oil company is in frequent contact over the radio. They want to know exactly how everything is going. For them, time is money. It costs the oil company $50,000 US dollars a day to rent the tanker. That is a cost of at least $75,000 US dollars before the oil is even on board! Every hour costs them another $2,080 dollars. The oil company tries to put pressure on the crew to speed up the filling process, but Captain van der Valt and his crew are experienced sailors and don’t get flustered easily.
15 August 2005
For most of the Arabians living in the Gulf, driving their expensive cars along the Sheikh Zayed road to the mosque on a Friday, there is not a single oil rig or refinery in sight. They don’t have to think about the oil reserves – just knowing they are there is enough. If you’re the son of a citizen of Dubai, like 13-year-old Mohammed, you don’t have to worry about oil or money. Many Arabians in the Gulf make a living either from rent – as landlords for the shops and apartments, or from shares and investments. Others sit on the board of directors for local and international companies (in Dubai, international companies cannot undertake business without a local contact). Mohammed’s father is one of the directors of a company that runs Dubai’s oil treatment plant and operates the oil distribution terminal. Once or twice a day he looks over the paperwork and signs a few documents – the rest takes care of itself.
In some cases in Dubai, the interest rates, financial rewards and levels of business responsibility awarded to each citizen are closely linked to their family name. The closer a citizen’s family is to the ‘tribes’ of Dubai’s ruling family, the bigger the financial rewards. A tribe is made up of all the members of a particular family. The tribe arranges everything for its members throughout their lives. Mohammed is part of this tribe culture. He attends school in the mornings, plus twice weekly he attends Qur’an school in the afternoons. In a year he will be sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.
At present however, every Friday Mohammed goes to the mosque in Dubai and then has a meal with his family. He may only speak if he is spoken to – this is an unwritten law in Arabian countries. The family meal follows strict traditional rules. The men wear long white robes known as kandura and guthra (headscarves) on their heads. They keep to themselves, while the women and young children eat in a separate group. The food is laid out on a huge, fine Persian carpet. There are countless small sharing dishes to start the meal: marinated aubergines, olives, rich humm
us, toasted sesame seeds, marinated garlic, cheese, and a range of delicious sauces. The traditional main dishes are grilled lamb kebabs, roasted lamb, and marinated lamb in a rich sauce, served with a mountain of rice.
Traditionally, people only eat using their right hand. If someone put their left hand in the communal rice, the other diners would recoil in disgust. This is because hundreds of years ago, the nomadic tribes of the Gulf used their left hands to wipe themselves after going to the toilet. Even though nowadays people can afford bathroom suites with inbuilt showers, this knowledge from the past has left a lasting impression: you only eat with your right hand.
It could be said the citizens of Dubai, like other Arabians in the Gulf, are torn between the present and the past. They have built the most modern city of the 21st century. They drive fast cars, wear expensive rings and watches and play golf. They travel to New York, London and Munich with huge entourages and stay in luxurious hotels. But at the same time, they don’t want to be separated from their traditional way of life.
After dinner the men sit and smoke shisha (flavoured tobacco) and drink strong tea or coffee. The head of the tribe asks, “Mohammed, have you thought about where you would like to study in the long term? Have you picked a good university in America or England yet?”
Mohammed blushes and looks down at the floor. He doesn’t want to lie, but he knows that telling the truth just isn’t worth the hassle. His father answers for him, “If it was up to Mohammed, he would become an ice-hockey player!”
All the men in the room laugh. Unfortunately for Mohammed, even the citizens of one of the richest countries in the world can’t always do what they want. The fathers and the heads of the tribes always have the last word. The leader of Mohammed’s family tribe sets down his tea glass, folds his hands and looks at Mohammed. “If we all followed our dreams, we would all be racing drivers, poker players and camel jockeys!” he says. “But then Dubai would only have a few skyscrapers, and they would all belong to foreign investors. We are strongest when we work together. Allah has chosen a role for each of our family members. Dubai’s oil will soon run out. The money we have made has been cleverly invested, but what we are missing, young man, is knowledge. How do you build a skyscraper? How do you create a mobile phone network and boost the signal to improve reception? How do you manage a hotel or a theme park with over a thousand employees? To answer all of these questions we still need outside help, and this is why our cleverest sons have to become engineers and managers. When I speak of our clever sons, I mean you Mohammed!”
Mohammed looks at the floor and lets his mind wander – his thoughts are of ice hockey, just as they are at every Friday family dinner. Finally, it’s time for him to leave. His chauffeur drives him to the winter sports centre, which includes an enormous snow park with a real snow ski slope. When you have vast amounts of oil and gas at your disposal, the cost of refrigeration isn’t a problem. Mohammed waits for his teammates in the changing rooms. He pulls on his ice hockey shirt and puts on his skates – both were ‘Made in the USA’. On the ice rink, his coach is already carving out a route across the ice. He smacks the puck into the left-hand corner of the goal. Mohammed’s trainer is Canadian and used to play ice hockey professionally in Canada. How much ex-professionals get paid to teach young people ice hockey in Dubai is a state secret. If you want to know more about winter sports in Dubai, visit www.skidxb.com.
Even though Mohammed is wearing a padded ice hockey shirt he feels a little chilly. A fleece body warmer would come in handy right now. He obviously wouldn’t wear one like mine though: his would be a designer fleece. Not that it matters anyway though. My fleece is not even close to being finished. In fact, its journey has only just begun.
3
Oil Tankers: The Whipping Boys of Globalisation
16 August 2005
It’s morning at Jebel Ali Port. While Sadek cycles to work at Dubai’s old port and Mohammed walks to school, the Madras finally leaves Dubai. There is barely a metre between the heavily loaded ship and the seabed, so the tanker moves cautiously until it enters deeper water. The raw materials for my fleece are finally on their way to Chittagong, Bangladesh, at a speed of exactly 15 knots (around 24 kilometres an hour). The tanker’s speed is closely regulated by the oil company, which pays for the fuel used to run the ship.
Captain van der Valt cannot relax until the Madras has sailed through the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. He must stay on the bridge to navigate regardless of how long the journey takes, which can be up to 16 hours. The sea is shallow and the Gulf is narrow, and the many tankers and ships sailing through the bay have to pass in extremely close proximity with one another. The coast of the strictly Islamic country of Iran stretches out behind the Madras. Boats patrol its territory vigilantly.
After almost 150 kilometres the Madras reaches the Strait of Hormuz, where the shipping lane is only 100 metres wide. Thankfully, there is no queue of tankers waiting to pass through the strait, so the Madras can sail on without stopping. After almost 13 hours, the Madras finally reaches the Oman Gulf, which opens out onto the Indian Ocean. Finally Captain van der Valt can leave the bridge, go to bed and sleep.
The rest of the tanker’s route is simple. It will sail across the Indian Ocean to the most southern point of India, and from there it will head in the direction of Bengal. For most of this 4,500 kilometre stretch of sailing, the helmsman will have only one instruction: steady as she goes. The rest of the crew have to focus on keeping the motor running at its optimum capacity and on the general state of the tanker and its cargo. Carrying 180,000 tonnes of crude oil can be likened to ferrying around a sleeping, irritable dragon. In order to prevent rough seas from causing the oil to slosh around dangerously inside the ship, the loading space is divided into six individual tanks, which are supported with steel beams. If the interior of the tanker was simply one huge hollow space, the pressure of the seawater from outside would crush the ship like a shoebox as soon as it was emptied.
20 August 2005
The monitoring of the ship and its cargo takes place from the control room at the back of the ship. This means that Dutch Captain van der Valt, Portuguese first mate and boarding engineer Raul Jorges and the 21 Filipino crew members spend their entire journey in one small area at the rear of the ship.
Only one crew member regularly ventures out onto the deck: Raul, the first mate. In order to stay fit, he spends his free time using the 200 metre steel giant as a running track, jogging past pipes, thick anchor chains, hose pumps and huge vents. Raul only has to do 30 laps of the deck to run 12 kilometres, which he tries to do daily. Here in the tropics however, the temperature reaches 30° Celsius by mid-morning, and Raul breaks into a sweat so quickly that he usually only runs about half that distance. After all, he needs to hold back some energy for his daily tasks on the ship and for his favourite hobby, chatting online.
Super Tankers
The 194 metre long Madras is a LR2 (Large Range 2) tanker, built for covering medium stretches of water and entering shallow harbours. She can hold around 125,000 tonnes of crude oil or other liquids and has a 125,000 deadweight tonnage. (The deadweight tonnage is the maximum possible weight a ship can safely carry, and is often abbreviated to DWT).
Super tankers are categorised as VLCC’s (Very Large Crude Carriers, which can carry over 200,000 DWT) and ULCC’s (Ultra Large Crude Carriers, which can carry over 300,000 DWT). These days most super tankers are between 310 and 350 metres long, have a capacity of up to 350,000 DWT, and are run by 30 to 40 crew members.
But what is 350,000 DWT? A super tanker in the ULCC class can hold two million barrels, or 318 million litres, of crude oil. That is the equivalent of 17,000 road tankers.
Super tankers in excess of 400 metres have been built, but they are difficult to control and can only use a limited number of shipping routes due to their enormous size. Even super tankers of 300 to 350 metres in length can only dock at a few harbours, due to the depth of their
hulls.
On board the Madras, first mate Raul thinks the Internet is an amazing invention. He spends a huge amount of his free time on board the ship discussing his views online with people all over the world. He shares his extensive knowledge about the oil industry, machinery and shipping routes on online forums. He also uses the Internet to let off steam. It really annoys Raul that no one likes tanker ships. Admittedly, oil tankers aren’t beautiful; in fact they’re pretty ugly. But oil tankers are an integral tool for the whole of the human race. Super tankers are also the largest steel constructions ever built by humans. At up to 400 metres in length, many are larger than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which is only 320 metres high. Furthermore, the Eiffel Tower is made up of lots of small pieces to form a large steel frame. The body of a tanker, on the other hand, is made of vast sheets of welded steel. A double-thick exterior wall also protects newer tankers. From 2015 this will be the official standard for all tankers worldwide.
In spite of this, when most people hear the word ‘super tanker’, they immediately think of accidents, environmental catastrophes and ruined beaches. Raul thinks this is hugely unfair. Firstly, accidents resulting in environmental catastrophes are incredibly rare, and secondly, it is almost never the fault of those who work aboard the tankers when such accidents do occur. The blame usually rests with tanker owners who refuse to remove older, less seaworthy vessels from service. Oil consumers who want their petrol to be as cheap as possible, but don’t want to know how the oil products they use are transported, can also be held accountable. Cost cutting has consequences.
These days, a lot of oil is transported through pipelines, such as the pipeline from Siberia to Western Europe. But oil tankers are still at the heart of the crude oil chain. Online, people take a stab in the dark when Raul asks them how many tankers are shipping oil at any one time. Most people imagine it is 1,000 or less. Others are convinced it is 2,000 or 3,000 ships. In actual fact, the number is closer to 7,000 ships at any one time. But even 7,000 ships are not enough to keep up with the world’s growing demand for oil.
Made on Earth Page 2
