The E80 highway winds up through the Kose Daghlari mountain range. Night is falling, and the swaying of the warm coach has sent Mehmet Ali to sleep. These forested peaks through the window are the northern edge of the Euphrates watershed. For just 250 kilometres the road and the pipeline swing into the headwaters of the Çobanlı Çay, flowing red-brown towards the Black Sea. It is as though the crude takes a last glimpse backwards towards the port of Batumi and the lands of Georgia, before progressing on towards Europe.
BTC KP 1,220 – 1,407 KM – REFAHIYE, TURKEY
Eye witnesses reported that at around 23:00 local time on August 5, there was an explosion at valve number 30 in Refahiye County in Erzincan Province. The explosion was followed by a fire, sending flames up to 50 meters into the air.
Hürriyet, 6 August20
BTC officials in Baku and Ceyhan control rooms recorded that the pipeline pressure was falling and closed valves 29 and 31. Additional pumping was stopped. The estimated 12,000 barrels of oil in the pipeline between valves 29 and 31 were left to burn out.
‘Today’s Zaman, 8 August21
Turkish officials have strenuously denied that the PKK was responsible for the damage and have claimed that the fire occurred due to a technical failure.22
Around 2 a.m., Baku time, this morning the BTC control system detected an anomaly at Block Valve 30 in Turkey and the pipeline was shut down . . . Shortly afterwards eyewitnesses alerted local authorities of a fire at that location. The fire is being contained by fire fighters. BIL, the Operator of the Turkish segment of the pipeline is leading the response . . . We have no estimate on the timing of the return of the pipeline to service.23
BTC letter to Société Générale, Intercreditor Agent for the pipeline, 6 August 2008
It is a moonlit night in the valley of the Çobanlı Çay as the coach pulls up. The half-light emphasises the snowy peak of Wolf Mountain, rising over the pine forests. This is Refahiye, place of another ancient caravanserai, stopping point on the road from İstanbul to Persia and beyond. We halt by the petrol pumps of a motel which brands itself ‘SHELL – petrol turizm’. Obviously this is the one for us.
We have come to Refahiye to investigate what happened at Block Valve 30 when the pipeline exploded and caught fire, on 5 August 2008. Eyewitness photographs show vast plumes of smoke over the small square compound – like the one we had seen outside Hacalli in Azerbaijan. The pipeline was out of action for several weeks. BP was forced to export Caspian oil through the Baku–Supsa line just three days before Russian planes dropped bombs next to that pipeline system in Georgia. This is the event we asked about when we met Aydin Gasimov in Villa Petrolea and Orxan Abasov in Sangachal, from neither of whom we had learned very much. We want to discover just how critical the situation was.
We have read the letters BP sent to the banks and the export credit agencies, which we obtained after repeated Freedom of Information requests. These reveal that over 30,000 barrels of oil were spilled – almost three times as much as the newspapers had reported. Four days after the explosion, on 8 August, BP sent a memo, via the French bank Société Générale, to the Lender Group of financial institutions, explaining that the site of the incident was located above an aquifer and that there was a risk of pollution reaching the nearby river.
These letters and memos were intended to reassure the lenders that BP was in control, despite the explosion and the subsequent outbreak of war in Georgia. On closer inspection, however, the letters show inconsistencies. The first report issued by the company states that the fire was extinguished on 11 August.24 A later evaluation contradicts this: ‘BTC adopted the strategy of allowing most of the oil to burn, rather than attempt to extinguish the fire at an early stage.’25 But when we talked over the matter with BP staff, they admitted that the various fire brigades had indeed attempted right at the beginning to put out the fire. First they used water, then they switched to the more appropriate foam. Either way, it seems that the fire was so intense that the fleet of red trucks from Erzincan, Sivas and even Ankara was unable to put out the flames. Ultimately, the companies could not control the blaze and had to let the fire burn itself out, thereby filling the valley with smoke for nearly six days.
By picking through the paperwork, we have been trying to answer the questions that the incident throws up. Why did the fire brigade try to put the oil-driven fire out with water? Was there simply no communication between BTC Co. and the fire service? For every four barrels of crude that went up in smoke, one soaked into the nearby earth: almost 6,000 barrels of oil were spilled into the ground at Refahiye. And we read that 1,500 cubic metres of soil were contaminated and had to be excavated and stockpiled.26
What of the wider repercussions? What must it have felt like for men like Ibragim Teregulov in the Control Room at Sangachal when the pressure in BTC dropped? How was the news received in the top corridor at Villa Petrolea and in the pump stations at Jandara and Posof?
We have a photograph that we got from BOTAŞ in Ardahan, which shows the repair works after the fire. A white man with a square face can be seen giving orders. He is the BIL technical director, Erin Ford – the man responsible for getting the pipeline running again as soon as possible.
BIL, or BOTAŞ International Ltd, is a subsidiary of the Turkish state company that oversees the operation of the pipeline in Turkey. Once BOTAŞ had constructed BTC, they handed the running of it over to BIL. And Ford, although formally employed by BIL, was really a representative of BP, appointed by BTC Co. according to the Operating Agreement signed between the companies. Ford had started his career in the US oil company ARCO, in 1981. After twelve years in Alaska, BP’s takeover of ARCO brought him to the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico, before he transferred to Tbilisi and eventually Turkey.
Ford was most likely helicoptered to the explosion site at Refahiye on 6 August, along with other senior BIL staff. As manager of 600 of the company’s 1,200 employees, he had ultimate responsibility for whether to put out the fire and how to build a temporary pipeline to bypass the rupture. At some point, Ford made the call to summon BP’s pipeline repair team from Baku on the grounds that BIL was not up to the job. Even after the flames had died out, pipeline workers could not approach the site for forty-eight hours because of residual heat. Then it took a further twenty-four hours before workers could close surviving isolation valves and stop the crude spilling out onto the earth. Despite the chaotic decision-making we have been told about, Ford reminisced cheerfully about those summer events in BP’s in-house magazine, Horizon: ‘I was amazed at how synchronized we all worked in Turkey, Azerbaijan and Georgia . . . It made me proud of the people who work in this company; everyone went beyond their responsibilities.’27
Ultimately, we are most interested not in how the fire was extinguished, but what caused the explosion in the first place. Media reports quoted the Kurdish PKK as claiming responsibility, but the Turkish government claimed it was a technical fault.
The answer to this question is of great importance, because it determines who picks up the bill for repairs and losses. When the pipeline blew up, BP was left with no means of transport between its six Caspian platforms, which were extracting nearly a million barrels every day, and customers’ tankers waiting in the Mediterranean. The company began to export oil through Baku–Supsa, although this pipeline can only carry a fraction of BTC’s load and delivers to the eastern Black Sea, several days’ journey by tanker from the Mediterranean. Unable to meet its commitments to its shipping partners, BP declared force majeure, claiming ‘an act of terrorism’. Under the Host Government Agreements, Turkey had accepted legal responsibility for the security of the line. Should a corporate arbitration panel decide that the explosion was due to failed security, BP would be able to claim compensation for its losses from Turkey.28
The stakes are high. We obtained an internal update, sent by BP two days after the explosion, which showed that lost transit tariffs to BTC Co. were $5 million every day.29 Meanwhile, far larger sums were l
ost by the BP division that owned the oil being pumped. In early August 2008, oil prices were hovering around $120 a barrel – almost a record high, from which BP could not profit.
So we try to work out which of the possible causes for the explosion is the most likely. The first possibility is that it was a technical fault. We know from the statements by the whistleblowers that construction of the pipeline in Turkey had been substandard. Infrastructure accidents had been common in the two years since oil had begun to flow along the pipeline. Only six weeks prior to the explosion, BTC’s repair team completed welding work after eighteen months of problems at one point on the pipeline not far to the west.30 In September 2008, barely a month after the fire, a faulty valve at the nearby Sivas pumping station caused a temporary shutdown.31
However, the second possibility – that the pipeline was blown up – appears more likely, especially given that the PKK claimed responsibility. Bahoz Erdal, second in command of the Kurdish group, explained that ‘as an economic target we chose to attack the BTC pipeline because we think that attacks like these would stop Turkey from pursuing its aggression toward the Kurds’. 32 Targeting pipelines is not unusual for the PKK. In March 2008, the rebels claimed responsibility for a blast on a gas pipeline from Iran; the following November they blew up the Kirkuk–Ceyhan oil pipeline. The increased focus on pipelines coincided with a drop in hit-and-run attacks on Turkish military convoys. This shift in tactics took place at the same time that the USA started providing ‘actionable real-time satellite intelligence’ to the Turkish Army, gathered by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency at Fort Hood in Texas. This made PKK movements far harder. Blowing up BTC could have been intended partly as a message to the US military, who would have registered the explosion.
This second theory is in BP’s interests, as it would mean that the damage occurred due to Turkey’s failure to protect the pipeline, as required by the Host Government Agreement. In his Tbilisi office, Matthew Taylor had told us: ‘Remember that security is the responsibility of government.’ He added a sceptical note implying that Turkey would try to dodge any liability: ‘Turkey will say it’s examining the causes – investigating and investigating, for thirty years – until this is all forgotten.’
There is a further theory as to what lay behind the pipeline explosion: involvement by the ‘deep state’, or derin devlet. While, to outsiders, ‘deep state’ may sound overly conspiratorial, it is a very real entity to many Turks. This shadowy network – involving ultranationalist ‘Grey Wolves’, secular politicians, the military elite and mafia bosses – intervened regularly in Turkish politics throughout the previous three decades. It has assassinated leftist, Kurdish and Islamist activists, participated in military coups, and committed ‘false flag operations’ that were subsequently blamed on the PKK. Blowing up BTC would fall easily within the capabilities of this group.33
After settling in to our rooms at the ‘SHELL – petrol turizm’ motel, we discuss plans for the next day over dinner. To make better sense of the explosion, we want to hear from those living closest to it. In August 2008, Mehmet Ali was interning with Platform in London. He interviewed the muhtar (mayor) of Yurtbaşı by phone, who told him that the fire was close to his village. But exactly how close, we do not know. Remembering the difficulties we had finding the Russian bomb craters in Georgia, we expect a similar experience.
Before setting out the next morning, we remove anything potentially incriminating from our daypacks. Given our previous experiences of the Jandarma, we are concerned about being watched and stopped. We walk into the centre of Refahiye and find a taxi driver in a battered blue Niva who will take us to the village of Yurtbaşı.
As we drive down the E80 highway, the driver asks us why we are here, for it is pretty clear that Refahiye is not much of a tourist destination. Cautious, given the still unknown politics of our taxi driver, Mehmet Ali mumbles something about a book on the Turkish countryside. Not interested in this topic, the driver changes the subject to the major local happening of the last year – the pipeline fire: ‘It burned for ten days. People were evacuated from their villages. Fire engines came from everywhere . . . Yes, it was sabotage.’
And all of a sudden, there it is. Right there, alongside the main road: a line of containers, a row of portaloos, an access road with a security guard, half a dozen men in orange BTC jumpsuits and white hard hats, and a pile of large pipes. Amazing – a mere ten minutes in the car and we have found the site of the explosion. But we want to meet the nearby residents, so the driver continues onwards for Yurtbaşı. He turns north off the road, and up a strip of asphalt towards a cluster of silver-grey corrugated iron roofs at the edge of the plain, gathered in the lee of a great cliff of sandstone. The lushness of the valley floor contrasts with the harsh greys and browns of stony dirt and scrubby plants on the mountain above.
We arrive in the heart of the village, on the mud street between the houses. Asking for the muhtar, we are escorted across a stream, past some willows struggling into leaf, to a pristine white mosque. The muhtar is away, but we are instructed to wait in a meeting room below the mosque itself: the village elders will come to talk to us. The room is painted a pale green, with posters of Mecca and the Sultanahmet Mosque on the wall. White plastic chairs surround a white plastic table on a white tiled floor. It is all spotlessly clean.
In comes a man in his forties, Murat. Clean-shaven, wearing a grey striped shirt, polished black shoes and a dark suit, he looks surprisingly urban for this distant corner of Anatolia. He explains that 400 to 450 people live in Yurtbaşı, mostly subsisting on arable farming and cattle pasturing. He is intrigued by us. When we mention that James is an expert on birds, Murat wants our help in understanding why certain species are dying off. He says he suspects that it might be due to ash from the pipeline fire.
Others arrive, most prominent of whom is Ahmet. We had seen him earlier in the street, working a piece of wood with a plane. It turns out he is the stand-in imam, which fits with his priestly serenity and the way that the others defer to him.
His tone is sharp, and he starts complaining about an English MP who recently came to Turkey to make a film about orphanages. We are nonplussed, but he is clear that it represented the country in a bad way.. Yet he too wants to know why bird species are declining – is it due to climate change? – and whether the pipeline fire will affect the animals, especially the bees. The ash from the fire fell all over the ground – he is worried that it could weaken the cattle, and damage their milk and meat. The companies let the fire burn for six days – would they have done the same in England?
Our conversation is interrupted by a call to prayer from the mosque Tannoy. To our surprise, nobody moves, not even the deputy imam. Far off, through the window, we can see the black marks of conifers dotted against the white peak of Wolf Mountain. The questions continue: Why do they use depleted uranium weapons in Iraq? The West is the main emitter of carbon dioxide, so what is it going to do about climate change? Mehmet Ali is getting exasperated; although he agrees with many of Ahmet’s concerns, he feels that they are framed through an overly nationalist prism, obscuring Turkey’s cooperation and allegiance with the ‘West’.
Somehow, during the questions, the dynamic in the room shifts. The ash previously mentioned is now described as a ‘fog’. Murat and the others say that the fire was not caused by sabotage, but was a technical fault: a valve cracked, then electricity sparked the conflagration. Such things happen around the world, after all. Foreign engineers worked on this pipeline, so the explosion was not BOTAŞ’s fault. Suddenly it seems that the landowners were well compensated for the use of their fields by the post-fire repair equipment. The impacts of the fire were not serious, after all, and the village had substantial help from doctors, army and police.
The story has completely switched tracks. The opening concerns and questions have all evaporated, leaving a forthright assertion of the benefits of this ‘Turkish pipeline’, a ‘national project’.
&n
bsp; The mood alters further. The villagers want to take our photos and copy down our passport and ID card numbers. They write a statement and ask us to sign it. Mehmet Ali reads it aloud: the statement declares that the villagers spoke with us, but ‘did not say anything controversial’. They are clearly trying to cover their backs, but who are they frightened of? The Jandarma? Company officials?
We ask if we can walk on the hills around the village, but that is not possible. They insist on giving us a lift back to the main highway, which amounts to escorting us off the premises. Leaving the building, we see piles of bunting with the logo of the AKP – the ruling Islamic party – left over from the recent election. ‘These are nationalist and conservative villages’, Mehmet Ali remarks; ‘I feel uncomfortable with them’.
Murat drives us down the village road and along the E80, to a roadside lokanta restaurant. For a while it seems he will sit with us until we have eaten lunch and headed back to Refahiye. But as we slowly eat our kebabs and rice, he nods goodbye and leaves.
We decide to try to discover further stories of the explosion. This time we head for Alacaatlı, a village on the south side of the valley, closer still to Block Valve 30. A fresh tarmac road winds uphill towards houses clustered where green pasturelands meet a mass of conifers that stretch towards the snowy higher reaches of Wolf Mountain. As we cross the waters of the River Çobanlı and the line of BTC marker posts, we are walking through alpine flower meadows. A man passes on the road. ‘Welcome’, he says with a smile. Perhaps these people will be less suspicious of us.
The Oil Road Page 28