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
