We had imagined that the pipeline would follow the road over the pass, but we were wrong. From the middle of the village of Timau we can see the path of TAL running across the wide boulder-strewn bed of the river, picked out by a clear strip denuded of willow saplings. It passes beneath the road and then straight up the mountainside: again, the strip cut through the hazel, oak and fir.
Off the main road, over the crash barrier and into the cleared strip, we follow the line, scrambling up the slope. The first stretch is manageable, but halfway up it becomes almost vertical. We are determined to press on, so we ditch our jackets and scrabble on all fours, bag and camera bashing about. Up and up, out of breath and worried now: ‘What if we slip on the small pebbles, fall and break a leg?’, ‘If we have an accident here, how do we get off, and how do we explain why we were here in the first place?’ We are getting to the point of nervous exhaustion, but can see what we think is a small ledge ahead: there, we can rest.
We make it to the ledge – but it isn’t one. It is an expanse of flat gravel, with two JCB diggers parked up: a worksite completely hidden from below. The mountain wall ahead rises in a vertical face, but there is a large entrance cut into it, blocked by a pair of bolted, green-painted metal gates. It dawns on us that this is the pipeline plunging through the mountain’s heart, far below the summit. It seems extraordinary that the oil companies drilled and dynamited their way through this rock, building the equivalent of a road or rail tunnel, just to shift crude across Europe.
Only after we have taken photos of the pipeline’s route up the mountainside, and the tunnel entrance, do we notice the signs saying: ‘This place is under video surveillance’; ‘This is private property of SIOT’; ‘No unauthorised access’. So we follow the roadway that slopes down from the worksite ledge, then cut down through the wood to the main road, trying to look inconspicuous. Half an hour later, at the edge of the village, we see a man coming down the road in blue work overalls, the insignia of TAL is on his chest. He is looking out for something on the mountainside. We wonder whether he is looking for us – but we are gone.
A taxi takes us, hairpin after hairpin, up to the high ridge of the mountain and through what is known to the Italians as Pass di Monte Croce Carnico and to the Austrians as the Plockenpass. Swathed in cold mist, the border is marked by a cluster of abandoned buildings and a forlorn-looking wind turbine whose blades are immobile in the stillness. Unlike at Krazny Most in Azerbaijan, or Türkgözü in Turkey, there are no guards here to check our passports or control the movement of people and goods across this international boundary within the EU. Meanwhile, the crude passes through the mountain, far below us.
TAL KP 135 – 4,742 KM – MAUTEN, AUSTRIA
Walking the next morning in a thick pine forest penetrated by lumber tracks and streams that feed the River Gail, we find the pipeline in the Rogaswald. From the entrance on the Italian side of the border, the oil companies tunnelled their way through nearly seven kilometres of rock, passing under the mountains of Gamspitz and Koderhohe, before re-emerging into the Austrian province of Karnten, or Carinthia. From here, the waters that flow into the Gail will eventually reach the Danube, and beyond it the Black Sea. TAL has entered the German-speaking world of Mitteleuropa.
Close to the banks of the Gail stands the hamlet of Wurmlach. A pale green oil tank, rising six metres from the surrounding fields, marks the first pumping station of the Adria–Wien pipeline, the AWP. This branch of TAL runs onwards to the refinery at Schwechat, just south of Vienna, providing the fuel for the Austrian capital that Churchill demanded half a century ago. Like the Transalpine pipeline, this sub-pipeline is owned by a consortium, this time dominated by the Austrian oil company OMV, with 76 per cent of the shares, but also including Shell Austria, Agip and BP Austria.
Beside the TAL oil tank stands another of a similar scale, painted in the colours of the rainbow. This is a biomass plant fuelled with waste from the surrounding farms. On the road between Wurmlach and the nearby town we had seen the sign announcing ‘Mauten – Klimabündnis Gemeinde’ (‘Mauten – Climate Alliance Parish’). Outside the town hall, above the advertisement for the War Museum (1915–1918), is an official notice, ‘Energie Autark: Kötschach-Mauten’ (‘Energy Self-Sufficiency Kötschach-Mauten’).
The combined parishes of Kötschach and Mauten are striving to meet their energy needs from local renewable systems. As well as the biomass plant, there is the wind turbine we saw at the Plockenpass, and a number of hydro plants and solar electric systems.
Standing by the green mesh fence topped with barbed wire that surrounds the pump station, we can smell the faintest whiff of oil: the scent of Azeri crude in the Alps. How intimately these two endeavours are entwined. The surrounding communities are striving to draw energy from their own renewable resources, and thereby reduce their carbon dioxide emissions. They are understandably concerned about the impact of climate change on their snow and winter tourism, but nonetheless are dependent upon the petroleum systems that deliver visitors from the cities. Meanwhile, the pipeline, supplying 75 per cent of the oil needs of Austria, runs almost completely invisible, and utterly unremarked upon, across 25 kilometres of the parishes of Kötschach and Mauten.
It would be the same in a parish in England. There is a sense that these international pipelines are not about us and so do not concern us: they are about somewhere else. We think of them as forming part of our national infrastructure, like a bridge or main road, and imagine them to belong to the state. We are not in control of them, we are not responsible for them. They seem unchallengeably vast, a fact of life. Perhaps it is this sense that makes us so blind to them?
LIENZ, AUSTRIA
We trudge along the highway verge, against the heavy oncoming traffic, towards the ruins of Aguntum. The A-road, which we had travelled along by bus from Mauten, cuts straight across this archaeological site on an elevated bridge. Set back a little is a cool postmodern box, the new museum.
Built across the route of the Via Julia, after it had climbed over the Plockenpass, Aguntum was a strategic settlement in the Roman province of Noricum, whose territory covered what is now Central Austria and part of Bavaria. The road carried away rock-salt from the mines at Hallstatersee, gold from Klagenfurt and timber and cheese from the mountains and valleys.
In 27 BCE, Augustus, the first emperor of Rome after his assumption to the position of principe, began the consolidation of the empire. New roads were built, the army reorganised. Roman rule was pushed to the limes, which were intended to be the empire’s eternal limits. The northern frontier2 ran along the banks of the Danube, while the eastern frontier ran through Theodosiopolis, now Erzurum, on the Euphrates, and Apsarosi, today’s Batumi, on the Black Sea.
‘Imperatore Domitiano Caesare Augusto Germanico L. Julius Maximus, Legion XII Fulminata’, runs the easternmost known Roman inscription. It is carved into a boulder on Boyuk Dash mountain, near the Sangachal oil terminal, memorialising a reconnaissance mission by a centurion during the reign of Domitian. Within twenty years, the Emperor Trajan had extended Roman rule to the shores of the Caspian Sea, absorbing this territory into the province of Greater Armenia. However, stiff resistance from neighbouring states, such as Atropatena, meant the province was relinquished in 117 CE. The frontier retreated back to the Euphrates, the limes as determined by Augustus.
Wandering around the museum, what catches our eye is a map illustrating Aguntum’s position in the Roman trade system. It lists the exports that we knew about – gold, cheese, and so forth – and also the imports to this province – lapis lazuli from Afghanistan, pottery from the factories in the Rhineland and oysters from the northern Adriatic. We are reminded of Bruno Lisjak telling us how oysters from the Vallone di Muggia had been sold in Vienna.
Two thousand years on, the mineral deposits of Austria are exhausted, but the agricultural exports – wood and dairy – remain. Throughout these mountains there is timber production on an industrial scale. We see wood yards, stacks of b
eech and pine, lumber trucks, saw mills, swathes of felled forest. Everywhere we look there are advertisements for the region’s cheese – Almkäse. The farming method known as alm pastoralism is at least as ancient as the Celtic peasants who lived here under Roman rule. Once the snow melts, the cattle, sheep and goats are driven from the valleys, up to the high pasture, the alm. Like the yayla pastures in Ardahan province, the alm is grazed in the summer. On the summer meadows in the mountains, the animals produce too much milk for the handful of farmers, so it is made into cheese. Protein is preserved in a form that can travel and last into the winter months, like smoked meat or salted fish. Such cheese was once traded down the via to cities like Aquilea and Rome; now it is exported onto the world market.
BLOOMSBURY, LONDON
Between 121 and 125 CE, the Roman Emperor Hadrian undertook several journeys by land and ship. He visited the province of Noricum, and very probably the city of Aguntum. He also travelled to the provinces of Britannia; Germania Superior, now Bavaria; Achaea, now Greece; Cappodocia, now central Turkey; and Bithynia and Pontus, now northern Turkey. Remarkably, the pipeline and tanker routes that we are tracing fall almost entirely within the geographical territory of the Iron Age Roman Empire that Hadrian travelled.
In the summer of 2008, Hadrian was celebrated at the British Museum in London, in an exhibition sponsored by BP. The accompanying catalogue featured a sponsor’s Foreword, which dilated on Hadrian’s remarkable achievements and on BP’s pride in backing an exhibition that ‘offers a new appraisal of Hadrian’s turbulent life and reign through artworks seen together here for the first time’. The Foreword was signed, ‘Dr Tony Hayward, CEO BP plc.’3
Some of the most celebrated objects in the exhibition were fragments of a colossal statue of Hadrian, excavated the previous year from the ruins of Sagalassos in southern Turkey. The London exhibition saw these items on display for the first time. Unsurprisingly, the opening and private view were attended by officials from the Turkish embassy, in the company of Tony Hayward. Also present were representatives of Georgia, as artefacts had been lent from Tbilisi as well. The opening was a significant cultural event; for BP, it was part of maintaining good relations with key governments – critical when dealing with events such as the explosion at Refahiye and the bombing of Baku–Supsa – just two weeks after the exhibition opened.
Like many other corporations, BP has a long history of engagement with the arts. However, in April 1990 the company began a new wave of sponsorship, as the then CEO, Robert Horton, echoed a practice that had been successfully conducted by corporations in the US since the early 1980s.4 It signed five-year contracts with the Tate and the National Portrait Gallery. Deals with other prominent cultural institutions across London followed soon after: the British Museum, the Royal Opera House, the Natural History Museum, the Science Museum, the National Theatre and the National Maritime Museum. And the ties between BP and these institutions go deeper. Orxan Abasov, our guide at Sangachal, was trained at the Natural History Museum; John Browne joined the board of the British Museum and, on retiring from BP, was appointed chair of the trustees of the Tate.
BP’s annual sponsorship budget is not mere philanthropy. It helps build what the company refers to as its ‘social licence to operate’, which means the company having the support, or at least acquiescence, of the key communities in whichever state it conducts its business. Sponsorship helps create a favourable impression of the company among what are called in the public relations business ‘special publics’: journalists, academics, civil servants, diplomats and politicians. The aim is not to encourage people to buy more petrol, but to persuade them that BP is a socially responsible organisation, and that they should either actively support the company’s interests or accept that, on balance, BP is a force for good and therefore should not be questioned. Just as the company was able to mould ‘civil society’ according to its interests in Baku, so it intervenes in London’s body politic. In this way the opening night of Hadrian: Empire and Conflict helped draw both of these strands together, underscoring BP’s influence not only in the culture of Turkey and Georgia, but also that of the UK.
The industrial colossus of this Oil Road along which we are travelling is constructed in many phases – in politics, in law, in public and private finance, in engineering design, in impact assessments, and then in physical reality. During this process, before the pipes are laid in the ground and throughout the operational lifespan of the pipeline, the support for the project has to be maintained in the ‘special publics’ within the states through which the oil passes and in the capitals of the key international powers. The construction of the ‘social licence to operate’ is the constant engineering of this support.
After a quick tour of the ruins of Aguntum, we return along the main road. Trucks roar past, buffeting us with their backdraught. We head towards the centre of Lienz, the main town of the province of Osttirol. In the outskirts we pass shopping warehouses, a couple of garden centres, a drive-in sex shop and several giant supermarkets: standard features of high-energy consumer society, but they look curiously out of place, strangely temporary, in this extraordinarily beautiful landscape of bright green meadows, towering pine forests and snow-capped peaks.
The Roman legions withdrew from this area in about 340 CE. Aguntum was utterly destroyed and lost by 600. This Roman civilisation lasted 300 to 600 years and was buried for 1,400 years, yet so much is invested in excavating and exhibiting it. Perhaps we are drawn to this Iron Age culture like a mirror, taking pride in a bold beauty that we can understand, as we draw from it intellectual and political models for ourselves. We also see our own death in its mirror. The collapsed and vanished exchange systems of Bronze Age Greece seem distant from us, but the complex trade routes and military structures of the Roman Empire – like the Venetian Empire that came long after – seem strikingly similar to our own world. So the evidence that that system unravelled and was lost provides a vision of our own frailty. These car showrooms, supermarkets, sex shops and garden centres may vanish just as completely when the Oil Road ceases to function.
TAL KP 150 – 4,757 KM – HUBEN, AUSTRIA
Our bus takes us north of Lienz, up the narrow valley of the Iseltal, in which river, road and pipeline are squeezed into a space never more than 500 metres wide. The marker posts of TAL are easily visible from the road.
We catch a glimpse of what we are searching for – the dark green bulk of an oil-storage tank, identical to the one at Wurmlach: another pump station. We descend from the bus at Huben. This is a tiny hamlet, about twenty houses crammed into the Iseltal gorge, with a church, a police station, a fire station, an Esso petrol station, and two guesthouses. On the rocky slopes above the village, areas of pine have been carefully felled. The export economy of timber is busy here.
Four more buses arrive as we look around, disgorging troops of school students, satchels on their backs. These teenagers are returning home from the secondary school in Lienz. Huben, on the main road, is the hub for the villages that lie beyond in the Kalstal and Deferggental – vertiginous glacial valleys hemmed in by the towering mountains of the Hohe Tauern. This is the remotest and highest region of Austria, whose pinnacle is the Grossglockner, a national icon. The majority of the area is preserved as the Nationalpark Hohe Tauern, the largest nature reserve in Central Europe, nearly 2,000 square kilometres in size.
The encroaching tide of the industrial world barely lapped at the upper reaches of the Isel and Tauern valleys until the 1960s. The Roman road never penetrated here, while the railway stopped at Lienz, far below. The natural wall of the Hohe Tauern made the road impassable to motorised traffic: the way north was by foot or pack animal, crossing the summit at Tauern Kreuz. This was a world of horses and wood stoves, cattle and kerosene lamps. How similar this hamlet must have been, only fifty years ago, to Dgvari and other villages around Borjomi that we visited in Georgia.
Not only was the Tauern valley a dead end for motorised traffic, but this whole
province of Osttirol was largely separated from the main body of Austria. After the defeat of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918, the Sudtirol became the Trentino, part of Italy – just like Trieste, Istria and Fiume – as the irredentists achieved their war aim. In consequence, Osttirol was cut off from many of its lines of communication with the main body of Austria.
So the government in Vienna drew up a plan to build a road tunnel through the belly of the Hohe Tauern mountain range and, alongside it, a tunnel for the TAL pipeline. The two projects grew like twins. Without the road tunnel, perhaps the pipeline would not have taken this route. Without the pipeline tunnel, perhaps the pressure for the road would not have been sufficient to realise this massive engineering project. Together, they altered life in all the region’s valleys and villages. Now the Tauern valley and the Felber valley, on the north side of the mountains, are no longer dead ends, but throughways for traffic and oil. Just outside Huben, by the pump station, are the offices of the Transalpine Ölleitung in Österreich, which, like SIOT, is one of the three subsidiary companies of TAL. Here staff administer the Austrian section of the pipeline, and oversee its maintenance and security as it passes through a land of freezing winters and scorching summers. The pipeline’s future depends upon the people of this region, and vice versa.
On 11 April 1964, the Austrian chancellor, Josef Klaus, came here for the ceremony that marked the beginning of construction. Land was purchased for the pump station; an army of workers and trucks arrived, widening the roads, laying the pipeline and blasting the tunnel. An intense concentration of labour and capital expenditure, and a million tonnes of TNT, heralded a new world and changed the life of this hamlet that is now on the Oil Road.5
The Oil Road Page 38