The Oil Road

by James Marriott

  This realignment of crude supply coincided with a shift in petrol provision to Czech motorists, as BP and other Western companies advanced into a previously inaccessible Eastern Europe. BP bought gas stations in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Poland. These garages, with their Helios sunflower logos and attendant mini-supermarkets, were bright icons of Western consumer products, and played a part in the reorientation of their states’ economies.

  We complete our walk around the perimeter of the compound and return to the front gates. Across the road, at the Kösching refinery, tankers arrive to collect their loads. Around 1,000 lorries a day leave the three refineries around Ingolstadt, to supply gas stations and domestic oil tanks up to 100 kilometres away in any direction. A similar number of trucks roll out from each of the other plants supplied by TAL, – at Kralupy, Litvinov, Schewechat, Burghausen, Vohburg and Karlsruhe.

  Meanwhile trucks and trains fill the storage tanks of Air BP at airports in southern Germany. This complex process of deliveries – perhaps 250 road tanker movements a day – is coordinated by the Amsterdam-based computers and controllers of BP European Logistics.

  There is still no one at the entrance cabin of the Lenting depot, but somewhere on this site somebody is watching one of the meters that register the flow of the river that runs from the middle of the Caspian to southern Germany. At precisely this time, as we idle on the roadside, other people are watching meters in other control rooms in Sangachal, Ceyhan, San Dorligo, Karlsruhe and Amsterdam.

  It takes minutes for pressurised oil from the Pliocene sandstone layer to move up the riser to the drill deck of the Central Azeri platform in the Caspian. Within the next few hours the oil has passed through the pipe across the seabed to Sangachal; a further ten days sees it pumped through the BTC pipeline to Ceyhan. Four and a half days aboard a tanker brings thousands of barrels from Turkey across the Aegean, Ionian and Adriatic seas. If this load is not delayed at the tank farm of San Dorligo, it takes three days for the heavy liquid to travel over the Plockenpass and through the Hohe Tauern to Lenting. From the depot in front of us the crude passes to a refinery. Over a period of two days it will be broken down into heavy heating oil, petrol or diesel – products that are then pumped and trucked onwards to power plants, factories and petrol stations. Some of the crude is refined into aviation fuel and supplied to airports such as Munich, where it might fill the tanks of a 747 bound for India.

  It takes twenty-two days for this process to run its course – for the oil to travel over 5,000 kilometres across the Earth’s surface, and for it to move from 5 kilometres below sea level to 10 kilometres above sea level; twenty-two days for geology laid down 4 million years ago to be incinerated into gas. The energy of those rocks takes minutes for the engines to burn. It is as though we are consuming time itself.

  This machine drives forward minute by minute, hour by hour, a vast system transferring carbon from the lithosphere to the atmosphere.

  INGOLSTADT, GERMANY

  We cycle back across the city to the entrance of Ingolstadt’s abandoned refinery. Weeds grow around the gates. Through the fence we can see a great expanse of concrete. There are still some crude storage tanks and a couple of tall chimneys, stripes of red and white against the sky. The scene reminds us of Gәncә and Rustavi.

  On Monday 18 August 2008, the refinery closed after forty-three years of operation, with the loss of many jobs. Once, it symbolised the transformation of the Upper Danube into a petrochemical futurescape; but now that vision has faded.

  On the day Ingolstadt closed, no crude was being exported from the ACG oilfields. The previous Tuesday, as Russian tanks crossed the Baku–Supsa pipeline, BP had stopped pumping. Meanwhile, BTC was still out of action following the explosion at Refahiye two weeks before. But, whereas the 1973 Oil Crisis profoundly shook the towns and cities of Bavaria and elsewhere, the political earthquake in the Caucasus hardly registered as a tremor in Ingolstadt. By the time the vibrations of the crisis in Sangachal and Ceyhan reached the control rooms of Lenting and Amsterdam, the events were easily navigated.

  Western refineries found other short-term sources of supply beyond Azerbaijan, and tankers from other ports besides Ceyhan could be directed to Muggia, to maintain the flow of oil through TAL. The lack of significant impact from the temporary stoppage on BTC belies the project’s importance. The pipeline played a crucial role in both the US and EU attempts to pursue energy dominance by asserting long-term influence over oil-extracting and transit regions, diversifying their sources of crude and asserting the pre-eminence of the energy market. BTC itself represents a significant 1 per cent of global oil supply, and, crucially, transports crude from states outside the Middle East and OPEC.

  The summer 2008 closure of the Ingolstadt refinery is full of political symbolism. The joint owners of Bayernoil sold the plant to the Indian company CALS Refineries, which then proceeded to move the entire structure, from control rooms to pipework, all the way to Haldia in West Bengal. Kirsten at Bayernoil had spoken excitedly about this development. She explained that the cracking towers and distillation plants had been loaded on to river barges and floated north along the Main–Donau Kanal to the River Main, and from there down the Rhine to the North Sea. At Antwerp the plant was transferred on to ships and taken via the Suez Canal and the Arabian Sea to the Bay of Bengal. Kirsten seemed delighted – all the more so because the old refinery site was soon to be transformed into a stadium for her beloved FC Ingolstadt.

  We stare through the gates, thinking about how such a massive industrial plant, covering 106 hectares, can be packed up like a toy set and sailed across the oceans of the world to a new home in the Indian subcontinent.

  The fate of Ingolstadt sums up a much wider, changing picture. Consumer demand for petroleum products in Europe appears to have peaked. Just as, in the 1890s, when the Rothschilds found that the European market for oil was saturated and turned instead to the markets of Asia, so in the early twenty-first century the region of growth in global oil demand is East Asia. BP, like all its rivals, has been working hard to break into the Indian and Chinese markets.

  Bayernoil is a consortium of four companies, but in the sale of the Ingolstadt refinery, it was BP that gained most.8 Five months prior to the closure, the chief executive of BP refining and marketing, Iain Conn, signed a memorandum of understanding with CALS Refineries to supply crude to the Haldia plant. The agreement stipulated that BP would deliver 5 million tonnes a year to the newly reconstructed refinery, and that BP would purchase all the refined petrol and diesel that the plant would produce.

  Having effectively outsourced the running of the refinery, BP will still be able to supply customers in Asia and Europe with products refined from the oil that it sells to Haldia. The closure of the plant on the banks of the Danube will not lead to any reduction in BP’s worldwide crude sales; nor will the relocation of the refinery mean any reduction in the amount of crude being processed. It does, however, mean a shift of employment to West Bengal, where labour is substantially cheaper and workers’ rights substantially weaker.

  When it is operational, the refinery at Haldia will supply aviation fuel and liquid petroleum gas to the Indian domestic market – in particular to the nearby mega-city of Calcutta and its international hub airport. The rebuilt plant will be a centrepiece of the Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd complex, the HPL – a new industrial zone at the head of the Bay of Bengal. HPL’s website speaks of a golden future: ‘A symbol of industrial resurgence in West Bengal, HPL has led the economic growth of the region by propelling significant investments in downstream processing industries . . . HPL has played a role as a catalyst . . . generating more than 1,500 employment opportunities in the process. With dedicated efforts, HPL truly symbolises its motto – “Come Grow With Us”’. How similar the proclamation feels to Schedl’s vision for Bavaria back in the 1960s.

  BP both drives and rides the geopolitical shifts of our age relentlessly. The dismantled refinery shipped up the Main–Donau Canal on r
iver barges echoes the sections of the ACG offshore platforms that passed down the Volga Canal to the Caspian a decade before. The opening up of the Indian economy by, and to, the multinationals is a next step after their push into the former Soviet Union and the Comecon countries.

  We turn away from the gates and pass the bus stop that once delivered workers on shift, but now stands without its sign.

  We have one more place to visit before our departure. In the Old City of Ingolstadt is a Baroque building painted in Hapsburg yellow: the Alte Anatomie, an eighteenth-century medical school that was part of the University of Bavaria, and famed throughout Europe. The building is far less dramatic, far less Gothic, than we had imagined. For it was here that Mary Shelley set the scenes in which the student Victor Frankenstein constructed his creature.

  Her novel, Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus, told of the cursed existence of a man driven forward by his ambitions and his desires towards the unwitting destruction of his fiancée, his family, his friends, and ultimately himself. Prefiguring the bravado of the architects of modernity, Frankenstein refused to ‘consider the magnitude and complexity of my plan as any argument of its impracticability. It was with these feelings that I began the creation of a human being.’9

  The building takes us back to the Caucasus and the original story of Prometheus, chained to the peak of Mount Kazbegi as punishment for giving man the technology of fire. Our journey has enabled us to see more clearly how the gift of crude has been used.

  In the first instance, oil from around Baku was exported for medicinal and building purposes, as fuel for the hearth and as a weapon of war – the raw material for Greek Fire. The trade in this oil, by sailing ship and camel train, ran for at least 2,300 years, from the Achaemenid Persian conquest of what is now Azerbaijan in 500 BCE until the 1870s.

  For barely a generation, from the 1870s to the 1900s, the crude was refined to produce one central commodity: kerosene. It was exported across the world via the tankers of the Caspian and the River Volga, the railway to Batumi, and the ships across the Black Sea and beyond. It provided light for homes, farms and factories, from the villages of the Far East to the cities of Europe. Baku had a globally dominant position in kerosene, with half the world’s crude extracted from its wells.

  In the following generation, from the 1900s to the 1940s, oil was utilised above all for motive power – fuel for trains and ships, cars and trucks, tanks and planes. The engines of the Red Army tanks in Georgia, D’Annunzio’s car entering Fiume, and the Allied bombers over Nazi Germany. It was this fuelling of the combustion engine that raised the Oil Road to its pre-eminent position in industrial societies. The pace of the oil trade itself was accelerated by the shift from coal to oil in the means of transportation – from the engines of tanker ships to those of tanker trucks. This forty-year period saw a massive expansion in global oil extraction; and though the output of Azerbaijan grew, Baku declined in importance relative to other provinces.

  The period since the 1940s has seen the rapid development of the oil-based chemicals that came to underpin every aspect of daily life, from plastics to fertilisers. The manufacture of these products gave rise to entire towns and industrial districts, such as Sumqayit and the environs of Ingolstadt. Meanwhile the use of oil as a motive fuel has grown exponentially.

  The presence of crude in the body of society since the 1870s has fuelled a kaleidoscope of visions for future social orders. From the Bolshevik speeches in the slums of Baku to the Futurist manifestos in Trieste; from the tank regiments of the Nazi Reich to the socialist techno-utopia of Khrushchev’s USSR; and from the orderliness of Social Democrat Germany to the armed nationalism of the Aliyevs’ Azerbaijan. Above all, as planes and cars burst into our consciousness, it has fuelled ‘modernity’ – the imagination of the machine age.

  All of this cornucopia has been powered by a liquid distilled from fossilised ecosystems, from plants and animals that lived from the Jurassic to the Tertiary era. These visions of the future have been dependent upon the ceaseless combustion of ancient rocks, just as Victor Frankenstein constructed his dream from the organs and limbs of the dead.

  The high-speed train glides through Upper Bavaria, bound for Augsburg and Stuttgart, as we head towards London. Beyond the windows, the villages are shrouded in mist. We see them in their Sunday morning sleep heated by oil; houses kept warm by rocks from beneath the Caspian.

  In the midst of the pine forest, west of Munich, we spot a vast array of photovoltaic panels, ranks of silver-blue surrounded by barbed wire and CCTV cameras. Soon we pass another field of panels, then a third. A hare runs across the nearby plough-land in the bright first sunlight.

  Rudi had explained how renewable energy systems in Bavaria have flourished in the last decade – a reassertion of the age of weißkohle. He told us that 80 per cent of the Deutsche Bahn trains in Bavaria run on electricity, and that 80 per cent of that energy comes from wind, water or solar power. The hydro-plants on the Danube alone generate 140 megawatts of electricity, the majority of which is delivered to the railways – including the very train that we are travelling on. The take-up of non-carbon energy systems across Germany has been remarkable. In 2008, 17 per cent of all Germany’s energy was provided by renewables. So much for Kirsten’s comment on alternative energy: ‘This is for kindergarten . . . there is no security with it.’

  With this level of renewable energy production generated locally, it is possible to conceive of a radical shift in the relationship between places of hydrocarbon extraction and places of consumption; a shift in the 140-year pattern exemplified by Bibi Heybat, ACG, the Baku–Batumi Railway, the Murex tanker, the Dugi Otok and TAL. Currently, non-carbon systems are augmenting the energy that continues to be provided by imported fossil fuels. But if renewable energy generated from within Germany and her immediate neighbours were to replace the power drawn from oil and gas, such a change would substantially contribute to the demise of the Oil Road.

  Rising up now into the Schwabian Alps, the train crosses the border into Baden-Württemberg, leaving Bavaria. Ahead are forests of fir and larch, meadowlands and wheat fields, three wind turbines peeking over the horizon. Soon we will tunnel under the Stromberg and leave the Danube watershed, returning home to the North Sea.

  VII LONDON

  EPILOGUE: THE OIL CITY

  THE CITY OF LONDON, ENGLAND

  The Oil Road does not end in Bavaria. Apart from oil and gas, what floods back and forth through the channels of these ‘energy corridors’ is financial capital and political influence. Whereas the crude from the Caspian may ultimately power a car in southern Germany, the profit generated mainly flows to London and New York. While the governments of Azerbaijan and Georgia were involved in the creation of the pipelines, the ultimate political drivers were in Washington, London and Brussels.

  On a crisp winter morning we gather a group of friends and allies outside a marquee on Finsbury Square, in London’s financial district. It is January 2012, and Platform is hosting a guided tour of our city. To shelter from the cold, we meet in one of the tents at Occupy London’s second site. The small canvas structure stands in contrast to the glass-and-steel buildings that surround the square.

  The walk will be an exploration of the oil city that we live in. For London is not only the headquarters of those companies and government departments that build oil infrastructure like the TAL and BTC pipelines. This city is also the home of many who oppose such ventures. Our walk aims to reveal the Carbon Web and London’s impacts on distant peripheries, as well as the struggle over the future of London itself. How long will it remain an oil city?

  Bundled up in scarves and hoods, we head down Moorgate to the offices of Cazenove Capital, one of the major institutional shareholders in BP. A couple of men, busy in conversation, step around us and pass through the revolving glass doors into the lobby. We describe a presentation we gave, in one of the wood-panelled rooms inside, in which we highlighted the risks inherent in deepwater drilling t
o a group of asset managers, including Wade Pollard, equity income fund manager. Shortly after we began our PowerPoint presentation about the implications of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, Wade explained how he and colleagues had followed the event with a sense of horrified fascination. ‘We all watched it on our screens. We had it on for months.’ The computer terminals had shown a grainy yellow and grey image of what at first glance appeared to be smoke billowing out of a chimney. It was the leak on the seabed of the Gulf of Mexico – the catastrophic spill that ran for eighty-seven days; a mesmerising plume of crude oil blooming into the ocean.

  We describe how we too had watched it in the Platform office. There was something sinister about its mute roar, 1,500 metres under the waves: a force of nature, viewable only with the aid of a remote-controlled submarine. It reminded us of Alexander Mishon’s The Oil Gusher at Bibi-Heybat. Shot in 1898, this sixty-second silent film documents an enormous blow-out that shrouded Baku in a heavy deluge of sticky crude. It celebrates a cornucopia of oil as a wondrous gift from the rocks to the well’s owner. But the contrast between the two is also striking, the nineteenth-century film of Bibi Heybat set against the twenty-first-century streaming video of the Macondo disaster. The first was made out of pride, celebrating newfound fortune, whereas the second was forced upon BP by the US authorities. The footage of Macondo, transmitted live on the internet for most of the duration of the spill, helped maintain the pressure on the company. Rather than making the well owner’s fortune, the force of this gusher brought BP to a point where it was only three days away from bankruptcy.1