The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  Browne was dramatically breaking ranks with his oil industry peers, some of whom asked him if he had ‘lost the plot’.12 BP withdrew from the Global Climate Coalition, a body established by the American Petroleum Institute to lobby against any climate-related regulation. There followed a wave of apparent change within BP, including the promise to build the BTC pipeline to the highest standards of corporate social responsibility. Three years later the company was rebranded with its sunflower-like Helios logo and the strap-line ‘Beyond Petroleum’. Investment in solar photovoltaics, wind-power schemes and biofuels increased. In 2005 a new division of the corporation was launched – BP Alternative Energy. Its head, Vivienne Cox, was given a seat at board level. Many of BP’s staff were deeply committed to this shift in direction that seemed to define the ‘Browne era’. Similarly, journalists and some NGOs believed that it indicated that the company was taking a new path – a belief that helped in the cooption and silencing of genuine criticism of the destructive impacts of BP’s operations.

  In April 2007, Browne returned to Stanford to give a tenth anniversary speech. Four days later, on 1 May 2007, he resigned from BP, ostensibly over revelations concerning his private life. However, the changes that took place in the following two years suggested that Browne’s departure was partly the outcome of a power struggle within the company.

  Under the new CEO, Tony Hayward, BP Alternative Energy was de-prioritised, solar facilities were cut back and Vivienne Cox left the company.13 The company made its first significant investment into the Canadian tar sands, a highly carbon-intensive source of unconventional oil that Browne had avoided. Soon BP was supporting groups in the US that actively denied the existence of climate change.14 It was widely understood in both BP and the wider oil industry that Hayward was not that interested in climate change. In retrospect it seems the summer of 2006 not only marked the opening of the BTC pipeline, but also the point after which BP’s claim to be addressing the issue declined.

  Throughout the twelve years since 1997, both Browne and Hayward’s strategies had focused almost entirely on fossil fuels, and the apparent shift away from them had effectively been a fiction. Even at the high-water mark of the ‘Beyond Petroleum’ drive, less than 1 per cent of the company’s turnover came from renewable energy. The scale at which the company extracted oil and gas from the ground continued to grow every year. It is this rate of extraction that keeps the company on collision course with the climate. Despite a decade in which BP publicly proclaimed a new path, the tankers ploughed on relentlessly, following the same routes as those of Marcus Samuel and the Rothschilds a century before them.

  DAY 3, 17:55 – 815 NM – 3,464 KM – SOUTHERN IONIAN SEA

  The vast engine room of the Dugi Otok, like a great hall several storeys high, is the realm of the chief engineer: heavy machinery, whirring shafts, grease and more grease. To walk along the multiple metal gangways is like entering a power station that burns hydrocarbon fuels in order to generate electricity, desalinate water and drive the ship onwards. Most large vessels can run on both diesel and heavy fuel oil. The latter carries a high sulphur load, which makes the emissions from the tanker’s funnel far more polluting than diesel. Under EU regulations it cannot be sold to vessels at European ports, but there is no restriction on ships burning it as they pass through European waters. Consequently, many shipping companies fill the fuel tanks of their vessels with the cheaper, heavy oil when in non-EU ports. The Dugi Otok’s 6S60 MC-C engine was designed by the MAN company of Augsburg in Germany to burn primarily this heavy fuel oil.

  Forcing a vessel like the Dugi Otok through the sea requires vast quantities of energy, especially on this outward journey from Ceyhan when she is fully laden and low in the water. Very large crude tankers use sixty-two tonnes of heavy oil every day to power their engines. At $800 dollars a tonne, the daily fuel costs almost hit $50,000 just to move it forwards.15 But as the Dugi Otok ploughs through the Ionian Sea, the threat to the environment comes far less from what is burned in her engine room and issues from her funnel than from what is contained in her hold.

  In his Stanford, speech, Browne committed BP to ‘control its own carbon dioxide emissions’, and indeed the company made efforts to make its oil rigs, refineries, road tankers and offices more energy efficient – which of course also reduced costs. However, this efficiency drive did not extend to the contractors it hired or the ships that it chartered. As BP’s own Sustainability Reports illustrated, the carbon dioxide released by the extraction processes of the company, at its oil rigs and so forth, were dwarfed by those released by the products it sold. Of the combined total of these two categories of emissions, 94 per cent came from what the company sold. The raison d’être of the corporation is to generate a return on capital, and this exerts a constant pressure to increase the volume of oil and gas it sells.

  The sheer scale of the carbon that the company delivers to the atmosphere needs to be understood. In 2006 the UK’s annual domestic emissions constituted 2.5 per cent of those of the entire world. In the same year BP’s total emissions represented 5.6 per cent of the global total. This one company was responsible for over twice the combined amount of carbon dioxide produced by 62 million British citizens. These raw statistics indicate that, if the company were truly to go ‘Beyond Petroleum’, it would change out of all recognition. It would need rapidly to retire those assets that deliver carbon to the atmosphere, such as its tanker fleet, the BTC pipeline and the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfield. Even if Browne, Vivienne Cox and others tried to alter the path of BP with the best of intentions, the company remains fundamentally embedded in the extraction of oil and gas, and hence, like the Dugi Otok, very difficult to turn around.

  DAY 3, 21:51 – 870 NM – 3,566 KM – ΚΕΦΑΛΛΟΝΙΆ (KEFALONIA), IONIAN SEA

  The Dugi Otok adjusts her course, heading north rather than west, through the Ionian Sea. This was the ‘Western Ocean’ across which the Greeks of the eighth century BCE journeyed with sail and oar to trade and found colonies.

  Some headed to what is now Libya, others to present-day Italy and France. The new cities they established, such as Syracuse, became so powerful that, within a century, they too were creating further colonies and trading posts, such as Adria, which gave its name to the Adriatic Sea.16 Other Greeks headed east and north, across the Black Sea, founding towns like Bathys, now Batumi. This adventuring was driven by trade, by the profit that merchants could make in supplying raw commodities of grain, fish and slaves. The demand for these resources came not only due to the rising population in the Greek city-states, but also because the fertility of the soils in those homelands was becoming depleted.

  It was through these trade systems that some of the building blocks of European culture evolved: the practice whereby cities extract sustenance and wealth from distant peripheries; the idea of a ‘civilised world’ and of the realms of the ‘barbarians’. The strangeness of those distant places and creatures is captured in the oral epic that Homer wrote down as The Odyssey. Perhaps this tale then acted as a form of navigational guide, or at least a source of comfort, to those Greek mariners.

  The north-eastern wind has risen to Force 6, and the Dugi Otok pitches and rolls in the foam-topped waves off Kefalonia. To the east is the crest of Mount Neriton, the highest point on the island of Ithaca. The same winds that buffet the tanker blew Odysseus off course, and made his journey home from Troy last not a month, but twenty years.

  The extraordinary story of the King of Ithaca’s return remains vivid today, 2,700 years after it was transcribed. But for those Greek navigators, it was already an ancient tale. It did not portray the Mediterranean world of the eighth century BCE, but a world 500 years earlier, the Mycenaean Bronze Age. Homer’s poem emphasised its antiquity by being written in a language that was archaic to its readers and listeners – as distant from them as Chaucer’s English is to us.

  The world that held the palaces of Odysseus at Ithaca, Nestor at Pylos, and of Agamemnon at Mycenae, f
amed for its golden facemask, had disappeared. The Mycenaean Age, with its network of trade routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, had come to an abrupt end. The cause of its collapse is debated, but deforestation and agricultural methods had led to rapid soil erosion and a steady diminishing of productive land. Meanwhile the global climate was shifting, which produced harsh droughts in the Aegean.

  As the archaeologist Barry Cunliffe notes, the states of the eastern Mediterranean were inherently unstable: ‘They were controlled by elites who owed their power to their ability . . . to maintain a constant flow of the rare or exotic commodities used in diplomacy and trade. Failure in any part of the system would have caused the entire edifice to crumble.’17 The landscape and history of this region provide us with a woeful lesson on the impacts of climate change and the ecological limits of society.

  In late August 2007, as the Dugi Otok travelled along this stretch of coast on a previous journey, the breeze from the east carried a heavy smoke load from the forest fires burning uncontrollably in the northern Peloponnese. Greece has been suffering from increasing levels of drought, and the scrub and trees on the mountains have been burning with greater frequency since the 1990s.

  The seaway upon which the Dugi Otok travels is part of the passage of oil from Azerbaijan to Western Europe, and the planned lifespan of BTC implies that tankers carrying its crude will ply this route for at least the next four decades. This relentless traffic in oil pushes up the global temperature and brings with it drought and fire. At some point the collision between the world’s atmosphere and this trade will lead to the latter being constrained. But what events will force the Dugi Otok and her sister ships to cease their passage, and the demise of this trade route? What events will lead to the BTC pipeline being retired early, for it to become – in the language of finance – a ‘stranded asset’?

  DAY 4, 04:59 – 970 NM – 3,751 KM – NORTHERN IONIAN SEA

  As the Dugi Otok leaves Corfu off her stern and enters Italian waters, she comes under the watchful gaze of the Italian Coastguard and its vessels, such as the Bovienzo. These boats patrol the central Mediterranean, particularly in search of migrants from North Africa heading towards the coasts of Europe. Their sea journey is notoriously dangerous. In the last week of March 2009, an estimated 1,200 passengers attempted the crossing. Of these only twenty-three survived. Hundreds of migrants went missing after two boats bound for Italy sank off Libya in separate incidents. One of the vessels was crammed with 342 people.18

  With our UK passports in hand, we have just travelled by train effortlessly across Turkey’s border with the European Union. But EU laws prevent these individuals from entering by plane or regular ferries, and they are forced to crowd into unseaworthy vessels and entrust their lives to the weather. As we had seen at Krazny Most in Georgia and at Türkgözü in Turkey, much of the EU’s border control is outsourced to neighbouring countries. In the Caucasus, Brussels-funded patrols, fences and cameras hinder migrants moving west. In the central Mediterranean, control is outsourced to Libya – then under the government of Colonel Gaddafi.19 By 2009, Italy had supplied the Libyan Navy with six ultra-fast Bigliani patrol boats armed with 30mm guns, specifically to intercept Africans attempting to flee to Europe.20 Interception is not about rescuing passengers whose boats have sunk, and there have been repeated reports of live-fire attacks by the Libyan Navy on vessels carrying migrants.21 Military resources are expended both to obstruct the flow of people, and – in the Gulf of Aden – to enforce the flow of fossil fuels.

  This effective militarisation of the Mediterranean has radically reduced the number of migrants reaching Italy. But tens of thousands are still trying to make the journey to Europe, forced into the precarious crossing in large part by the challenge of survival in the countries from which they come. One of the handful of migrants to be picked from the sea by the coastguard in March 2009 was twenty-two-year-old Moussa, whose story is typical. He had arrived in the coastal city of Zuwarah, near the Libyan–Tunisian border, from his native Niger. He joined others who came to the port asking for a boat to carry them the 300 kilometres across the sea to Malta, Sicily or the Italian island of Lampedusa.

  When the appointed time arrived, Moussa was trucked west into the open Libyan Desert in the middle of the night. Several hundred others were already waiting there. Before dawn, they were guided down to a beach and told to wade out to the converted fishing boat anchored just offshore. Its small engine was running, ready to depart at the first sight of the Libyan police. They were expected to be on board, without shelter, for thirty hours.

  Coming from Nigeria and Niger, Sudan and Somalia, the passengers were fleeing devastating poverty and resource wars. Drought and soil degradation have been forcing Nigerien farmers to move from village to village for decades. The dry spells are becoming longer and longer while the gaps between them shrink, making cultivation extremely challenging. Whole crops have been lost before the rainfall makes growing possible again.22 Spreading desertification means that sometimes it is not possible simply to move to the next village. Rather than face a slow death back home, Moussa had consciously chosen to make the risky journey northwards in search of survival and a safer life.

  The vessel that Moussa and his fellow voyagers took sank, hit by the fearsome qibli, a desiccating gale that blows from the desert and carries whirlwinds of sand. He was lucky to be picked up by the Italian Coastguard, but survival only meant internment in a camp on the island of Lampedusa, before deportation back to Libya.

  This growing wave of mass migration is largely the product of shifts in the world’s weather patterns. We heard stories of declining rainfall in the Caucasus and Turkey. In Central and West Africa, as more land transforms into desert, there is a more brutal illustration of how climate change impacts upon communities. All the evidence suggests that as carbon dioxide pours into the atmosphere, the cycle of droughts and migration will become more acute in the coming decades. In May 2009 the Global Humanitarian Forum, chaired by the former UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, produced a study that calculated that 600 million people will have been displaced by climate change by 2030. This is the human seascape through which oil from Azerbaijan is to be carried for the next forty years.

  DAY 4, 07:29 – 1,005 NM – 3,816 KM – STRAIT OF OTRANTO, ALBANIA AND ITALY

  As dawn breaks, the tanker enters the Straits of Otranto, once the busiest shipping lane of the Roman world. Wedged between Albania and the heel of Italy, this 72-kilometre liquid highway connects the Ionian Sea with the Adriatic. Across this short stretch of water, first-century sail and oar-powered triremes and liburnians hurried back and forth between the ports of Brundisium and Dyrrachium – present-day Brindisi and Durres. Senators and soldiers travelled down the Appian Way from Rome, crossed the Straits, and headed along the Via Egnatia to Byzantium. Merchants and slaves bearing silk, spices and cotton from Asia travelled in the opposite direction. This was the continuation of the trade route that ran to Sebaste (Ankara) and on to Theodosiopolis (Erzurum), and beyond the borders of the empire to the east.

  This ancient artery has been identified as part of the EU’s ‘Southern Energy Corridor’, a planned element of the European gas grid. A proposed pipeline to be built by the Norwegian company Statoil and the German E.ON would pump gas drawn from the Shah Deniz field through the Turkish network from Erzurum to Thrace, and then via the proposed Trans-Adriatic Pipeline through Albania, and under the sea to Brindisi. A parallel gas line, called the Interconnector Turkey–Greece–Italy Pipeline, is proposed to run just to the south, through Greece. Both are competing with the grander scheme of Nabucco, fighting for public funding and gas reserves. The progress of all three is high on the agenda of Richard Morningstar, special envoy of the US secretary of state for Eurasian energy, and Jean-Arnold Vinois, at the European Commission’s Energy Directorate General.

  We watch the Dugi Otok on the marinetraffic.com website, a red arrowhead navigating the straits amid the passenger ferries carrying tou
rists, with a sprinkling of yachts. Visibility is good, and adjusting course to avoid hazards must be easy.

  DAY 5, 03:29 – 1,285 NM – 4,335 KM – DUGI OTOK, CROATIA

  The Adriatic was once Venice’s lake. For several hundred years, the ‘Most Serene Republic’ – La Serenissima – held military and economic primacy over these waters. All vessels passing through the Straits of Otranto were to offer priority to Venice’s waterfront warehouses, in city districts such as the Rialto, for the purchase of their goods.

  The Republic did not set out to conquer the entire coastline of the Adriatic, but all ports of significance were to operate under its direct or indirect authority. With its many natural harbours, much of today’s Croatian Dalmatia was absorbed into the growing empire through adept diplomacy or military force. The administrators and lieutenants sent from the home city seldom ventured far inland. The mountains rising to the east marked the frontier, and their slopes provided Venice with a key commodity – wood. La Serenissima depended upon imported timber for its foundations (the piles driven into the lagoon upon which the city was built) and for its defence (the construction of war galleys in the Arsenale). The mountains of Dalmatia were largely deforested by Venice.

  On the Croatian coast, a thin island runs parallel to the mainland. This is Dugi Otok, or ‘Long Island’, from which the tanker takes its name. Beyond lies the town of Zadar, home of Tankerska Plovidba, which owns and manages the vessel, contracting it out to oil-traders such as BP’s Integrated Supply and Trading division.

  Zadar has been a seafaring town for millennia. In 384 BCE it dispatched 300 ships to resist Greek colonisers, and the city’s continuing maritime strength saw repeated conflict with the growing power of medieval Venice. Perceiving Zadar as a threat to its ambitions, La Serenissima launched assault after assault throughout the twelfth century, claiming that the town harboured pirates.