What is 42
inches wide and 1000 miles long?
Phase 1 of the
New Great Game and a large reason why the US has increased exporting weapons to
dubious regimes.
None of this
made the headlines in the US corporate media today.
The pipeline that will
change the world
By Daniel Howden
and Philip Thornton, Independent/UK, May 25, 2005
The first drops of
crude will snake their way along a pipeline that traverses some of the most
unstable and war-ravaged countries on earth. This is the oil flow that was
meant to save the West, and this morning the taps were turned on. Only 42 inches wide, the
Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan was supposed to alter global oil markets forever. The
1,000-mile project has transformed the geopolitics of the Caucasus and its
impact is now being felt in the vastness of central Asia.
Output is
supposed to reach one million barrels a day - more than 1 per cent of world production - from an
underground reserve that could hold as many as 220 billion barrels.
Its architects and investors claimed the pipeline would shore up energy
supplies in the US and Europe for 50 years, protecting our gas-guzzling way of
life and easing our reliance on the House of Saud.
The goal of the ambitious project, which makes its tortuous way from the
Caspian in Azerbaijan, through Georgia to the Mediterranean coast of Turkey, is
to ease the reliance of the West on the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting
Countries (Opec) and bring cheaper fuel to our filling stations. The pipe
threads its way through the region in a seemingly modest private corridor only
50 yards wide but nothing
has been allowed to stand in its way. From forests to labour laws and
endangered species to democracy protesters: all have given way to the costliest
and most significant pipeline ever built.
The project, known as BTC, has driven a wedge between the US and
Russia, triggered political unrest in the countries it passes through and their
neighbours and sparked concern at extensive damage to the environment.
Since the 11 September 2001 terrorist attacks in the US, concern at the West's
dependence on Persian Gulf oil has intensified. For Washington, the opening is
a cause for celebration. "We view this
as a significant step forward in the energy security of that region,"
said Samuel Bodman, the American energy secretary, who stood next to the three
heads of state at today's
ceremony.
With him at the pumping station controls was the president of the tiny former
Soviet republic of Azerbaijan. The BTC has allowed Ilham Aliev to become a firm
friend of the West while overseeing a government condemned for human rights
abuses and sitting at the head of an administration placed 140 out of 146 in Transparency
International's global corruption index.
The politics of the
pipeline have also
changed the face of Georgia, where the battle for control with Russia saw
immense US influence deployed in support of the so-called "Rose
Revolution". The popular protest ushered the American-educated Mikhail
Saakashvili into power two years ago. Washington's new ties with Tbilisi were
amply demonstrated when George Bush became the first US president to visit the
country earlier this month.
In the long-term US ally Turkey, where the pipeline crucially delivers its oil
direct to the Mediterranean - bypassing the tanker-clogged Bosphorus straits, it is no
accident that it does so right next to the American airbase at Incirlik.
When big oil
companies turned their attentions to the potential Caspian energy reserves
released from behind the collapsing walls of the Soviet Union, the region was
billed as the "new Middle East". If only the reserves could be
securely transported from the landlocked sea to the Mediterranean, the West
would be gifted a vital alternative to the volatile Persian Gulf and the region
would be freed from the iron grip of Russia, which had previously monopolised
the export routes of their former Soviet satellites.
Once the Soviet empire fell, the Caspian found itself surrounded by five nation
states - Azerbaijan, Iran, Kazakhstan, Russia and Turkmenistan.
The region's supply of cheap oil and key position on the historic border
between the West and the East meant that countries quickly moved into position
like pieces on a chessboard. Three
rival plans were drawn up - a northern route through Russia, a southern
alternative through Iran and the central option through the Caucasus to the
Mediterranean. The winner could be
in little doubt: the middle road was the only one which guaranteed Washington
and its corporate allies a corridor of control.
The US Vice-President Dick Cheney, who was then chief executive of oil services
giant Halliburton, was among the first to be swept away in the excitement. "I cannot think of a time when we
have had a region emerge as suddenly to become as strategically significant as
the Caspian," he said in 1998.
Now, more than a decade and $4bn (�2.2bn) later, almost three quarters of which
came from bank loans which were underwritten by government agencies and �320m
in taxpayers' money, the pipeline is open. But this chapter of what Rudyard
Kipling called the
"Great Game"
- the secret battle to dominate central Asia - has only reached the end of its
first phase.
The fanfare at the British oil giant BP's gleaming new terminal at Sangachal in
Azerbaijan may yet prove to be premature.
Stripped of the American hype of the 1990s, the crude that began a very
modest flow this morning is the first instalment of a reserve many analysts are
now convinced is actually only 32 billion barrels - equivalent to that of a small Gulf
player such as Qatar.
The game now moves to the transCaspian pipeline and to the immense plains of
Turkmenistan and the political cauldron of Uzbekistan, Afghanistan and beyond.
Article found at : http://www.energybulletin.net/newswire.php?id=6310
Original article : http://news.independent.co.uk/world/asia/story.jsp?story=641172
