Engineering wonder takes oil the long way round


AT 1,100 miles long, crossing mountain ranges and 1,500 waterways, the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline has been hailed as the first engineering wonder of the 21st century.
A decade after it was conceived it finally opened yesterday at the eastern Turkish port of Ceyhan.
A Turkish police officer guards the Ceyhan terminal
An epic feat of construction that cost £2.4 billion and employed up to 22,000 workers at a time, the pipeline will ensure that the precious reserves of the Caspian Basin - believed to be the largest remaining oil deposit outside the Middle East - can now be pumped to the edge of the Mediterranean and shipped on for the European market.
Starting in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, the pipeline passes through Tbilisi in Georgia before reaching Ceyhan, where it is expected that a million barrels of crude oil will arrive each day when the pipeline is working at full capacity.
Although it was two years behind schedule and £600 million over budget, the pipeline was hailed at an opening ceremony in Ceyhan yesterday, where the presidents of the three countries were joined by the head of BP, which leads the consortium that built and runs the pipeline.
As the heads of state and hundreds of dignitaries watched, oil was pumped into a tanker, the British Hawthorn, to be taken to Genoa in Italy. Lord Browne, the chief executive of BP, described it as an "historic achievement".
It is certainly an impressive engineering feat. Some 150,000 pipes were used and all were buried to avoid sabotage or theft. Each barrel of oil takes about a year to make the journey from Azerbaijan to the terminal in Turkey.
Its scale has more to do with geopolitical reasons than commercial ones. A simpler route would have taken the oil from Baku through Russia to the Baltic Sea or via Iran to the Persian Gulf. Neither was acceptable to the United States, which insisted that "strategic importance" had to be a priority.
Therefore the route west was chosen through "friendly" countries. It first heads north-west as Azerbaijan is officially at war with its western neighbour Armenia over a disputed border. Then it wiggles west to avoid Georgian separatist movements, before taking a large detour around Turkey's troubled Kurdish regions in its eastern provinces before finally going south.
The project was so politically charged that it has been alleged that US backing for Georgian democrats in the country's Rose Revolution was due to the previous regime's sudden cooling in its enthusiasm for the project.
There was also little diplomatic support for pro-democracy activists when Azerbaijan's government remained in power last year after disputed election results.
Russia was reportedly so angry at being snubbed that in 2003 it was accused by Georgia of training ecological saboteurs to damage the pipeline. It is also attempting to expand its existing pipeline from the Caspian.
Michael Townshend, the executive in charge of the BP project, said yesterday that the result had been worth the effort as its completion would help ensure the West's "energy security".
"The project will export around one per cent of world oil production so in that respect it is fairly small," he said. "But where it becomes important is that it is a new source of energy from a non-Opec source and that means diversification.
"And that one per cent is 25 per cent of the expected increase in the demand for oil over the next four years."
A gas pipeline following an almost identical route is scheduled to be completed by the end of this year. That will make it harder for Russia to use its gas reserves for political leverage with its neighbours and Europe as it did last year when it temporarily shut off supplies to Ukraine over a pricing dispute.
9 June 2006: US bypasses Russia with BP pipeline
15 November 2003: Instability that threatens the West's £1.8bn oil pipeline dream