The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  What is remarkable about these seemingly mundane processes is not only the space that the crude moves across, but also the time it takes. Although used in every crevice of our lives, plastics are too new for us fully to understand how long they will last. The ice-cream tub may eventually find its way to a landfill site, but it is unlikely to degrade for hundreds of years – far beyond the future plans of Neustadt or the lifespan of the ACG oilfield.

  After just a few decades of widespread industrial use, plastic, in the form of litter, is already an acute problem on land and in the oceans.19 Of the crude that the Dugi Otok carries, perhaps 10 per cent will be used to manufacture plastics. In her hold lies an unformed wealth of hip replacements, toothbrushes, laptops, sweet wrappers, and so on. But as she ploughs through the Mediterranean the tanker is passing through a soup of plastic. Every square mile of ocean is estimated to hold 46,000 separate pieces of plastic litter.20

  21 A LIQUID DISTILLED FROM A FOSSILISED ECOSYSTEM

  GROSSMEHRING, GERMANY

  The following day the weather is fine, so we hire bikes and set out to explore some of the places we had been alerted to in our conversations with Rudi Remm. From the centre of Ingolstadt we cross the Danube Bridge and head east along the riverbank. We soon find what we are looking for, as we peer at a metal sheet fixed to the top of a two-metre steel pole just by the cycle path. We read off the letters and numbers:

  Ol – /Gas Leitung

  Schilderpf.Ts 03

  VR km 0.533

  Mk 9

  BO 12

  BO 14

  Over the next three-quarters of an hour we jot down the details of thirteen such marker posts. Using the diagram that Kirsten gave us, we begin to figure them out: over there is TAL, running out of the Vohburg refinery and passing under the great river as it heads for the Lenting terminal. And here lies E.ON’s gas line, which feeds the power stations at Irsching and Großmehring. The first marker we found detailed a pair of pipes, belonging to Bayernoil – indicated by BO 12 and BO 14 – which ran between Vohburg and the now redundant Ingolstadt refinery. This network of pipelines runs under just one small part of the Factory, but the area that it occupies is of a similar scale to the Hohe Tauern National Park. It is as though we are cycling in an ‘Industrial National Park’, a zone established a decade before the one in the Alps, and similarly dedicated to just one central activity.

  As we cycle along, we tease out a riddle we created at the beginning of this journey: What has its roots in the sea, its trunk in the mountains, and its branches in the cities? The roots of the tree are in the Caspian, the trunk is BTC and TAL, and here in the Upper Danube are the branches. All of these industrial sites, these towns, these people, live in the branches of the system – high up, feeding on the fruits, rocked by the breezes, lulled to sleep. This is the tree at the centre of the world, and it bears a strange fruit that is part life-giving, part poison. ‘Rock-a-bye baby on the tree top, when the wind blows your cradle will drop.’ Storms often beset the tree, but once in a blue moon it is hit by lightening, the sap that flows up the trunk falters, and the leaves begin to fall. The Oil Crisis of 1973 was such a moment, but another storm threatened far more recently.

  Through the trees we catch constant glimpses of the red-and-white chimneys of Großmehring power station on the Danube’s northern bank. In the book about Ingolstadt that Rudi lent us, there is a photo of Großmehring soon after construction in 1965, waiting to fire up. The visionary city of Ingolstadt, with its attendant factories, was to need copious supplies of electrical power. Like water, roads and schools, electricity was provided by the state in the social market, and Großmehring was run by a publicly owned company. Electricity provision for everything from homes to hospitals shifted from hydro-power – or weißkohle – to fossil fuels. These engines of the Factory were built to burn oil rather than coal, unlike in the rest of Germany. Public power supplies were therefore to be dependent on an energy source in the hands of private multinationals, the most prominent of which was BP.

  In post-war Germany, as throughout Europe, a national grid system was created for electricity provision. It remains the same today, with a number of interconnected power stations feeding in energy. At times, certain stations might be shut down for repairs. Others might be mothballed when the price of their fuel is too high. This was the fate of Großmehring and Irsching, which are only switched on to generate power at times of peak electricity demand. Built originally as public utilities, they are now in the hands of a private German multinational, the Hannover-based E.ON. It is this company that judges whether or not to operate them, according to the profitability of electricity sales into the grid.

  FERNGAS

  E.ON Ruhrgas

  RHR 660

  MK nr 167

  Out here in the wildness and wet of the alder and willow, we find further posts that mark natural gas pipelines belonging to E.ON Ruhrgas, another subsidiary of E.ON. They illustrate a shift in the power supply of the Factory that took place in the 1970s.

  The advance of the German Army into Russia in 1941, and the threat of the Nazis seizing Baku, led to the Soviet petroleum industry rapidly shifting from the Caspian to Western Siberia. In the heat of war the Soviet engineers were pursuing oil, but in the following two decades it became clear that Siberia had vast deposits of natural gas. Soon this was being piped across the USSR and beyond its border to Comecon allies. By 1967, as TAL was coming on-stream, the Bratsvo pipeline was completed, bringing Siberian gas to Schwedt, just north of East Berlin: fuel for what had been the Soviet Sector of occupation, but was now the German Democratic Republic – East Germany.

  Fundamental to Chancellor Konrad Adenauer’s vision was a belief that the Federal Republic alone represented legitimate Germany. Its government would not recognise the East German GDR, nor would it have formal relations with any state that did so. This inflexible position changed after nearly two decades, when the Federal Republic’s foreign minister, Willy Brandt, opened diplomatic relations with Romania in 1967, and with Yugoslavia the following year.1 After his election as Chancellor in 1969, Brandt began to develop his strategy of Ostpolitik – the building of a dialogue with the GDR and other Eastern European states. This political shift was mirrored by an increase in trade between Germany and the Soviet bloc, in particular the trade in natural gas.

  The first agreement for the supply of gas from the USSR to West Germany was signed the following year, with importation by the private corporation Ruhrgas. BP had a 25 per cent stake in the company.2 As we cycled from the centre of Ingolstadt, we passed by the houses in the suburbs. These homes, as elsewhere in Germany, were connected to a national gas grid developed in the 1970s. Rudi had explained that the Bavarian state subsidised the laying of gas pipes to all towns and villages, helping shift domestic heating for the vast majority from wood to fossil fuels – exactly as had taken place in Soviet Azerbaijan a decade previously.

  West German imports of gas from Siberia increased rapidly after the end of the Soviet Union. Fifteen years after the reunification of Germany, 41 per cent of the new state’s gas came from Russia. In 2006, Ruhrgas, now wholly owned by E.ON, celebrated over three decades of imports by signing a new deal with the Russian company Gazprom to continue taking gas from Siberia until 2030. E.ON was by now Germany’s main gas import company, and was using it to drive privatised gas-turbine electricity power stations. In the 1970s both Großmehring and Irsching plants had switched from generating electricity by burning heavy fuel oil, and were now running their turbines mainly on natural gas. Consequently, today they are more dependent on the E.ON Ruhrgas pipeline beneath our feet than on the nearby refineries.

  But the shift from oil to gas as the central means of domestic heating and electricity generation only entrenched dependence on the importation of fossil fuels, and led to a mirror of the Oil Crisis of 1973. Twenty-seven years later, in January 2006, it seemed that lightning had struck again: this time, it hit not TAL, but the Bratsvo pipeline. It was triggered by
Gazprom losing patience with the national gas company of the Ukraine, which was failing to pay bills for the fuel that it was importing from Russia. Gazprom unilaterally shut off the flow of gas at the Russian–Ukrainian border, and threatened to maintain the shutdown until the financial matter was settled. Given that the pipeline also carried gas through Ukrainian territory to customers further west, there was consternation in Slovakia, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Poland and Germany. The European media thundered that, as long predicted, Russia was utilising its ‘energy weapon’ against the West.3

  Although, in comparison to the 1973 shock, the 2006 crisis over Russian gas supplies was economically insignificant, it nevertheless had a considerable political impact. In particular, it was used by the oil industry and government circles in Washington, London and Brussels to strengthen a discourse of ‘energy security’. By framing the issue as a right to guaranteed imports of fossil fuels, the EU and US justify the projection of power over oil-extraction regions, pipelines and tanker routes. These are the arguments used to bolster the militarisation of BTC and SCP as they pass through the Caucasus, and the West’s turning a blind eye to the authoritarian nature of the Aliyev regime. The crisis in 2006, coming only months before the opening of BTC, fed the rhetoric that oil routes from the Caspian must bypass Russian territory.

  Three years on, as we cycle along the banks of the Danube, concerns over Russian control of the gas supply to Western Europe are used to further demands for a ‘Southern Energy Corridor’. This ‘corridor’ would contain a number of pipelines running from Central Asia and the Middle East via Turkey towards Greece. These lines would feed the Trans-Adriatic pipeline – part owned by E.ON – or the Interconnector Turkey–Greece–Italy pipeline, both planned to run under the Straits of Otranto. The grandest of these projects is Nabucco, which would take gas from the Shah Deniz field and pump it via Bulgaria, Romania and Hungary to the central European hub at Baumgarten an der March, near Vienna. The political importance of Nabucco to Germany was highlighted in July 2009, when Joschka Fischer, the former foreign minister of the Federal Republic, became an advisor to the project. 4

  Over the tops of the trees we can see that no smoke is issuing from the chimneys of Großmehring or Irsching. It is the middle of a warm spring day: there must be low electricity demand in Bavaria. The turbine’s staff will be waiting for a directive from E.ON headquarters, at which point gas from Siberia will be burned on this riverbank among the willows and the alders. Soon gas from the Shah Deniz field in the Caspian, having passed by the villages of Rәhimli and Çalabaş, will be pumped from Turkey into the European grid system, and may make its way to these power stations of the Factory around Ingolstadt.

  MANCHING, GERMANY

  Cycling south, we pass through further suburbs of the city, clean and orderly with 1950s and 1960s housing blocks, out into the fields and woods. In due course we come to the dormitory village of Manching, with its winding lanes of detached houses and bungalows, converted farm buildings and neat gardens.

  On the village’s edge, by the banks of the River Paar, lie the remains of what was the largest settlement north of the Alps for 300 years. Manching was a Celtic oppidum settlement from the third century BCE until 30 BCE. In an area of 380 hectares enclosed by a high wall, a population of between 5,000 and 10,000 lived in houses on a grid of streets. Extensive ironworks used local ores to smelt and forge swords and jewellery. Manching was one of a network of over a hundred oppida that stretched from what is now England in the west to Hungary in the east. From Manching ran lines of exchange, undertaken by foot, by boat or by horse, such as the route over the Plockenpass, bringing wine in Roman amphora from the Mediterranean.5 This Celtic economic system collapsed after the Roman armies, under Julius Caesar, conquered Gaul. The lines of trade were redirected, some of them to the distant metropolis of Rome, and with this collapse came the demise of Manching. It seems that this town met its end not through sack and pillage, but through the destruction of a continental economic system that is now almost forgotten.

  We come to a section of the ancient ramparts. But we cannot reach most of the surviving wall, as it lies on the other side of the perimeter fence of an airport. The archaeological site was partly destroyed by the construction of a Luftwaffe airbase in the late 1930s, as the Nazi government rearmed. Badly bombed during World War II, the base became an Allied facility. Today it is a test-site for NATO weapons development, run by European Air Defence Systems. Rudi had told us that pilotless planes, ‘drones’, are currently being designed here: it is strictly off-limits, a ‘forbidden zone’ behind the high fence and a bank of pines. This, then, is one of those ‘other industries’ mentioned in Bayernoil’s brochure, ‘which place Bavaria on top in Germany and in Europe’ – part of NATO’s industrial complex.6

  The Morgenthau Plan would have stripped the German peoples of any army. However, the Cold War facilitated the Federal Republic’s rearmament and inclusion into NATO in May 1955, three years after Turkey. Ingolstadt became a West German garrison town, with barracks strategically placed around the rapidly growing city. By 1989 the US Sector South was supported by at least five divisions of Wehrmacht troops and armour.7

  Today, the ancient site at Manching is involved in the manufacture of military drones, similar to those paraded across Azadliq Square in Baku on 16 June 2008, and the Reapers tracking oil tankers and stalking Somali pirates.

  TAL KP 477 – 5,084 KM – LENTING, GERMANY

  ‘DEUTSCHE TRANSALPINE OELLEITUNG GMBH’, proclaims the sign on the chain-link gates of a compound just north of the city limits of Ingolstadt. This is the property of DTO, based in Munich – the third of the three companies that own the Transalpine pipeline, along with SIOT in Italy and Transalpine Ölleitung in Austria. The seven massive oil tanks of the Lenting depot were visible from some distance, as we had cycled here, nestled alongside the area’s third refinery, known as Kösching and owned by the Swiss company Petroplus.

  The sun is hot on the surrounding fields of winter wheat. Despite the rumble of the nearby E45 autobahn, the noise of passenger jets passing overhead and the roar from the gas flare of the refinery just behind us, we can hear skylarks singing.

  The terminal at Lenting is the most important node on TAL since the tank farm at San Dorligo, for it is the remote control centre for the entire pipeline. Surprisingly, there are no guards on the front gates, so we ignore the signs that declare, ‘Warning! This area in under video surveillance’, and skirt the perimeter fence on foot. We climb the gentle ridge on which the tanks are situated. At the summit the view opens up. To the north, out beyond the Danube valley, is the dark mass of trees that forms the Köschinger Forest. To the west, we can see the marker posts of TAL running towards Karlsruhe. This stretch of pipeline was originally called the Rhein-Donau Őlleitung, and carried crude from Karlsruhe to the refineries at Ingolstadt. But in 1967 the line reversed its flow and became part of TAL. Today it feeds the refinery at Karlsruhe, the largest plant in Europe, in which BP holds a 12 per cent stake.

  This final arm of the Transalpine pipeline carries the oil from Muggia out of the Danube valley, and into the valley of the Rhine, flowing towards the North Sea. Some of what is produced at the refinery is used to fuel the industrial barges that ferry goods up and down the river from Basel to Rotterdam. The crude from Azerbaijan has been piped through the catchment area of five seas – the Caspian, the Black Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Mediterranean, and finally the North Sea.

  We continue around the compound, and look out at distant ploughed fields and wooded hillocks such as Kalkberg and Kleiner Weinberg. The Transalpine pipeline from Vohburg to Lenting passes beneath them. Not all the crude carried by TAL comes this way. Some fills a set of four new tanks at the Vohburg plant. We had seen their white bulk from the walls of the town: they are monuments to the end of the Cold War.

  In October 1990, less than a year after the Berlin Wall came down, negotiations began for the construction of a new pipeline to run north-east fr
om Vohburg, across the former Iron Curtain and into the ex-Comecon country of Czechoslovakia, which itself was soon split into the Czech and Slovak Republics. In a mirror of the long negotiations that occurred in the early 1990s in Baku, a set of – far less fraught – discussions took place in the government ministries of another country in the former Eastern Bloc.

  Construction started on 1 September 1994. The trench was dug and the pipes were laid east along the Danube valley, past the city of Regensburg, and up into the Bavarian Forest. Rudi had explained that there was a great deal of opposition to this project, and that the Bavarian government had to create a new law to enable it to appropriate private land. Rising to 1,000 metres as it crossed the Sumava Mountains, the new pipeline moved from Germany into the Czech Republic, reaching the banks of the Vltava River, just north of Prague. Just as the pipeline westwards to Karlsruhe carries crude out of the Danube valley into that of the Rhine, this pipe running to the east moves oil from the Danube into the Elbe watershed flowing north towards the North Sea. The crude is destined for two refineries, one close by at Kralupy, and one at Litvinov on the north-western border with Germany. These final destinations gave the new structure, inaugurated on 13 March 1996, its name: the Ingolstadt–Kralupy–Litvinov pipeline (IKL).

  As a refinery town, Litvinov has long been a geopolitical pawn. Construction work on a plant first started there in 1939, after the region had come under Nazi control as part of the ‘Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia’. From 1965 it had been an end-stop for the Druzbha pipeline, built under Khrushchev to bring Soviet oil to satellite states. A mere six years after the Cold War’s end, the refinery was being supplied not only from Russia, but also from the West. Like the development of the ACG oilfield and the construction of BTC, the pipeline from Ingolstadt is another example of new Western infrastructure that pulled states out of Russia’s former sphere of influence.