The Political and Material Landscape of European Energy Distribution: Tracking the Oil Road

TAL KP 435 – 5042 km – Geisenfeld, Germany ¹

Night at the village of Geisenfeld in Southern Bavaria. The traffic is a constant roar on autobahn E45 between München and Regensburg. In the darkness we can make out the River Ilm valley falling away to the Danube plain and, directly north, the lights of the oil refinery at Vohburg. Orange flames of gas flares light up against the dark mass of the Köschinger forest. There is a glow in the sky to the east from the lights of the Neustadt refinery, and the low clouds to the west reflect the glare of another plant at Kösching. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Map of the Oil Road from the Caspian to Bavaria.

We are standing in the middle of a region that is effectively one vast factory. Spreading beyond the horizon are the constituent parts of this great industrial machine. This machine is in large part powered by fuel delivered through the Transalpine pipeline (TAL) from the Italian port at Trieste, which feeds 100 percent of the crude demand of Bavaria, 75 percent of Austria’s and 50 percent of Baden-Württemberg’s. The pipeline and refineries ² that stretch across the belly of central Europe form the fuel skeleton of central Europe, delivering gasoline for cars and trucks; heating oil for factories and hospitals; feedstock for chemical works and plastics plants; fuel oil for power stations and river barges; bitumen for roads and roofs. Twenty-seven million citizens live here, with some of the highest consumption levels on the globe.

This is one of the car-building heartlands of Europe. The automobile was in large measure born here, and there remains an array of car plants, including Skoda at Mlada Boleslav, BMW at Regensburg, Audi at Ingolstadt, and Daimler Chrysler near Stuttgart. The TAL refineries provide the backbone of this industrial realm.

The refineries fuel the consumption not only of those who live within here, but also those who pass through. It is criss-crossed by 11 autobahns covering thousands of kilometres. These transport corridors, carrying vast flows of traffic, echo the pipelines below ground. A family filling up their Volkswagen Golf in Ingolstadt can travel for over 500 km, south to the Adriatic or north to the Baltic. These automobilities extend the shadow of the factory across the landmass of the continent. But it does not end there, as the night sky over Geisenfeld is dotted with the flashing pinpricks of aircraft lights: jets arriving and departing from München’s nearby airport. The fuel from the Neustadt refinery will take a 747 to New York or Calcutta. The same is true for hub airports at Prague, Frankfurt and Stuttgart. The refined crude from TAL carries people and machines to every corner of the globe.

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The scene described here lies 5042 km along a contiguous route – an oil road from Azerbaijan to Germany, comprised of BP’s Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan and Transalpine pipelines and the voyage of a tanker across the Mediterranean. Our intent in this article is to portray both the physical spatiality of a carbonized sociotechnical system that has been discursively framed as an ‘energy corridor’ and the technopolitical forces that created, enforce and maintain it. By examining this one route, we aim to illustrate the parallel social processes, governmental and capital structures that have driven oil consumption growth since the 19th century, while also enabling and enforcing the constant movement of fossil fuels – social and financial practices upon which the high-energy mobility culture in Western Europe depends. For the fuel used for contemporary mobility systems relies on the mobility systems of fuel.

0 km – Central Azeri, ACG Oilfield, Azerbaijan

Frazer dangles on a rope from the rig high above the steel-blue swell. Below him, three of his six-man team abseil off the platform, checking for corrosion. The strengthening sun makes Frazer’s red overalls tight and irritating. His tattooed arms and back run with sweat. To make the work a little less routine, he pulls on the rope of his colleague below, and then lets go. The body beneath jerks suddenly; there is a gasp, and a stream of expletives rises up towards Frazer. He laughs.

It is shortly after dawn. Activity on BP’s oil platform increases before the heat of the day. Over 100 km east of Baku, but only 10 km from the territorial waters of Turkmenistan, Frazer is at work over the treasure house of Azerbaijan: the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli (ACG) oilfield. A few metres above his head is the 16,000-tonne steel deck of the Central Azeri no. 1 platform. The drill tower, like the spire of a cathedral, rises far into the air. Shooting out from the side of the main deck is the flare stack, a roaring burst of orange flame, brilliant both in brightest day and darkest night. The fire from beneath the sea.

Shift follows shift, day in, day out; this mine never rests. The labour force operate a platform that, although in Azeri waters, abides by the habits and culture of the western oil companies, following practices largely evolved in the North Sea (Oil & Gas Journal, 1994). English is the language and dollars the currency on this Scots offshore factory.

Central Azeri is one of seven BP platforms in the ACG oilfield. All but one of these seven mountains of steel were built on a more or less identical model. The main platforms were manufactured in ready-made sections in Norway. They were shipped on barges down the Volga canal and across the Caspian Sea to Azeri rig yards. Here the sections were assembled and then towed out to sea, guided to their precise locations by satellites. Seven hundred thousand tonnes of components were transported here by ship, train, truck and plane (Campbell, 2009). Now complete, these monuments – weathered by the sun and sea – have to be checked by Frazer and ‘his boys’ for rust.

At the heart of Central Azeri is the drilling unit, from which the drill plunges to the floor of the Caspian and then down another 5 km to the oil-bearing rocks of the Lower Pliocene sandstone layer. Through a complex web of valves on the seabed, the seven platforms operate 60 oil wells in the ACG field, drawing up Azeri light crude formed between 3.4 and 5.3 million years ago (Choi et al., 2011).

The hydrocarbons were formed from plankton and plants that thrived long before homo sapiens evolved. These organisms stored the energy of sunlight from the Tertiary period; now their fossilized and compressed remains are penetrated by the drills and, under immense geological pressure, rush up through the risers to the platforms. The oil industry is built on the extraction of these long-dead ecosystems, and the oil road is constructed to distribute ancient liquid rocks so that our species may live beyond the limits of the ecosystems of our times.

BTC KP 1 – 188 km – Sangachal, Azerbaijan

From the offshore fields, oil and gas is pumped along undersea pipelines to one of the world’s largest fossil-fuel terminals at Sangachal, on the Azeri coast just south of Baku. To the left of the coastal road, there is a strip of neatly fenced-off empty beach. A line of orange-and-yellow markers protrude from the water and continue up the beach. This is the finishing point of the 187 km pipelines that run across the bed of the Caspian from the ACG field. These banal posts on this scrap of beach mark the spot where 80 percent of Azerbaijan’s oil, and most of its gas, comes ashore. This is the physical reality of innumerable conversations and negotiations which took place in hotels, government buildings and corporate offices in Baku, London and Washington DC. Here, out of view, the oil is pumped under the busy highway and the Aztrans railway line, into the Sangachal Terminal.

We turn off the main road and head towards a sentry cabin. Above us a triple billboard points in three directions, displaying a map of the Baki–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, former President Heydar Aliyev’s face with a thin smile, and the legend: Heydar Aliyev Adina Baki–Tbilisi–Ceyhan Boru Kemeri 2005. ³ OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 2.

A billboard featuring former President Heydar Aliyev outside BP's Sangachal Terminal in Azerbaijan. © Mika Minio-Paluello.

Inside the high security fence lie stocky flare towers, processing compounds and fat yellow storage tanks like upside-down buckets. Sangachal is a gathering point for oil and gas from all over the Caspian, both pumped from BP’s offshore wells in Azeri waters and shipped in tankers across the sea from Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. Crude is stored here briefly in large storage tanks, awaiting passage through the BTC pipeline.

In the early 1990s, BP negotiated its way to corporate dominance in the Azeri oil sector, sealing two major deals for the Azeri–Chirag–Gunashli oilfields, and the Shah Deniz gas license. Uninterested in the sale of crude or gas to the domestic markets of the Caucasus states, BP and its partners then began the socio-political engineering of two pipelines to cross Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey – many years before physical construction started. Financial processes were devised, international legal contracts established and government policies aligned. In London, Brussels, Washington and Baku, BP coordinated an assembly of international financial institutions, government departments, law firms, construction contractors, intelligence agencies, environmental impact assessors, and public relations firms.

The outcomes were the Baku–Tbilisi–Ceyhan (oil) and South Caucasus (gas) pipelines – two sister tubes running in parallel trenches across the mountains and deserts, forests and fields of Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey.

BTC KP 187 – 374 km – Qarabork, Azerbaijan

The small village of Qarabork, 187 km across the desert from Sangachal, is surrounded by lush green fields watered by the River Kura. Along the BTC pipeline’s route there were two places where construction would likely involve destroying houses; Qarabork was one of them. BP was keen to avoid knocking down homes and forcing resettlement, as this would have reduced the chance of obtaining public funds to subsidize construction. So in Qarabork engineers explored the option of running the pipeline underneath the home of Mansura Ibishova. Built of wood and raised off the ground on stilts, Mansura’s home sat next to a garden dotted with fruit trees, neatly bounded by plank fencing. The elderly Mansura was tiny, with a small, deeply lined face tightly hemmed by an orange headscarf. Her eyes were almost frantic as she explained: ‘They are going to tunnel under the house, but they won’t give us any compensation.’

The foreign engineers came first in early 2002. They brought a document in Azeri, which she signed, but could not read. It was in the Latin alphabet, and like most of her generation she only reads Cyrillic, the standard script until President Heydar Aliyev decreed that it change. The men said she would have to move and would receive compensation. So she stopped growing her tomatoes and potatoes. Then she heard nothing.

Eventually, the municipality told her the company had changed its mind. It would build a tunnel under the house, so she would not have to move – and would receive no compensation. But she wanted compensation. She would rather they knocked down her house. She said her neighbour had declared: ‘If the pipeline burns, I’ll burn with it.’

We paced out the width of the construction corridor: 44 metres (BTC Co., 2002). The entire garden was only 38 metres across. In the still air we could almost sense the future pipeline coming from the east, passing beneath the house and hurrying away towards Georgia. A million barrels a day, moving at 2 metres per second, flowing under the kitchen at night.

This visit to Qarabork in 2003 was part of a fact-finding mission of a network of organizations raising concerns over the pipeline with the ‘Lender Group’ – the international finance institutions, export credit agencies and high street banks who planned to provide $1.6 billion of loans towards the BTC pipeline. Public officials at the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development and the International Finance Corporation (part of the World Bank group) had received strong steers to support BTC. Both the US and European Union (EU) had stated their geopolitical interests in ensuring that Caspian crude was pumped westwards. These international finance institutions regularly offer loans to multinationals to subsidize fossil-fuel projects that export natural resources and promote liberalized economics structures. But sustained campaigning by civil society groups has pushed these public banks to insist that the projects they fund meet basic standards on issues such as forced resettlement – the issue at Qarabork.

Bishopsgate, London

Five weeks after our visit to Mansura in May 2003, we met with Jeff Jeter, senior environmental adviser of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, at Bishopsgate in the City of London, as he was keen to know the details of ‘the place where the pipeline runs under a house’.

Jeff had agreed to confidentiality, but when we met him he started off by explaining how he had already talked to BTC Co., and that they had clarified matters to him. ⁴ Across the lined paper of his notebook his black biro drew the ground-plan of Mansura’s and her neighbour’s house, with an orchard between them. ‘BP says they can pass between these two houses and underneath the orchard.’ He ended up by saying: ‘BTC just wouldn’t put a pipeline in an unsafe setting, let me tell you. I’ve worked on this project for two years, and the care they give to safety … ’. There is a powerful sense of the presence of BP’s ‘expert knowledge’ and the absence of Mansura in this glass-walled room looking out over the Square Mile.

In the months following this meeting, the cavalcade of machines and men involved in laying the pipelines approached Qarabork from the east. Once a section of topsoil 28 metres wide was removed, the lorries came, each carrying three massive sections of black pipe. The pipes were laid out in a line, stretching kilometre after kilometre across the fields and streams. After the welders set to work inside their silver steel huts, the diggers cut a deep trench through the landscape, the raw earth heaped to one side. The pipes, now welded together, were lowered into the trench. In due course the earth was backfilled and the topsoil replaced. Then the army of labourers in yellow hard hats, dark glasses and orange fluorescent jackets moved on, heading west towards Georgia.

But near this village the standard method of laying the pipe halted, and both the BTC pipeline and South Caucasus pipeline (SCP) plunged deeper underground, under the road and under the orchard between the houses.

BTC KP 187 – 374 km – Qarabork, Azerbaijan

Six years later, we return to Qarabork. Mansura and her daughter have aged a great deal. Mansura’s shoes are torn and she is wearing multiple layers of socks. The house feels cold, heated only by a small wood stove, despite the vast quantities of gas and oil being pumped past.

The marker posts delineating the pipes’ route run just beyond Mansura’s garden fence. Neither Mansura nor her daughter feel any safer. Ultimately it matters little to them whether the pipeline passes under their house or under their orchard. Both are part of their home, and were there an explosion, their wooden fence will not protect them. Several times a week they feel a vibration that shakes the house, which did not happen before the pipeline was built. Cracks have started to appear in the walls.

BTC KP 264 – 451 km – Rehimli, Azerbaijan

We have driven 20 km west of Qarabork. We are searching for a field near the village of Rəhimli, the marker posts of the South Caucasus Gas Pipeline acting as our guides.

The Azeri economy was once heavily based on gas. Major grid expansion projects in the 1960s and 1970s led to widespread gas use for heating homes, with 80 percent of Azerbaijan’s 1.8 million households hooked up by 1990. The main power plants also ran off natural gas, so the fuel had a far higher level of penetration than in Western European economies, well before the initial ‘dash for gas’ in Britain. After the Soviet Union fell apart the grid deteriorated, and soon less than half of all households could receive gas, especially those outside Baku (Bowden, 2009). OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 3.

Warning marker on BP's South Caucasus Gas Pipeline next to Mansura Ibishova's house in Qarabork, Azerbaijan. © Mika Minio-Paluello.

Today, BP, the public banks and the Azeri government have rebuilt elements of Azerbaijan’s gas infrastructure. But rather than heating homes in the villages and cities, much of the fuel is pumped from the Shah Deniz field into the SCP, and then westwards out of the country.

SCP forces an annual 8.8 billion cubic metres of Caspian gas across the Caucasus mountains to the city of Erzurum on the Anatolian plateau, where it enters the existing Turkish gas network and is sent onwards to Ankara and Istanbul. Now the companies and the EU intend that a new 4000-km pipeline should extend beyond the SCP across Turkey, Greece, Albania and Italy into central Europe, locking Azerbaijan into the expanding European gas grid. If built, the new pipeline system will fuel power stations and domestic cookers across Europe.

The EU is promoting increased gas consumption at a time when the extraction of gas from within the member states is set to decline. This will create a major shortfall in coming years. By 2020, the EU expects to consume 650 billion cubic metres of gas annually, compared to 530 billion in 2010. For this to happen while domestic extraction falls, imports of gas will need to rise by 50 percent over the same ten-year period (Hoedt and Beckman, 2010). The European Commission has devised a two-pronged strategy to address the shortfall. Internally, the 27 member countries have been liberalizing and integrating the pan-EU gas market, while separating energy supply companies from transportation companies. In parallel, a concerted drive to build infrastructure to transfer fuel resources to Europe is led by European Commission civil servants working on energy and external relations, backed by financial support from the European Investment Bank and the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. New pipelines are to be laid across thousands of kilometres of mountains, sea, desert and tundra. EU proposals show a cobweb of pipelines running north, east and south, removing natural resources from ‘extracting countries’ and transferring them to EU consumers in the dominant economy.

The EU describes its plans as assuring ‘security of supply’ for the future. Working closely with European energy companies, its aim is to guarantee the increased provision of gas to European markets over coming decades. The argument runs that:

Europe is one of the world’s largest demand centres for gas. The Caspian and the Middle East make up the largest gas reserve region in the world. Today, there is no direct link between these two important demand and supply markets. To link those two markets through the Southern Corridor, i.e. Turkey and the south of Europe, is the logical thing to do. (Hoedt and Beckman, 2010)

It is perhaps unsurprising that the EU should find it ‘logical’ to transfer the gas resources of the Middle East, the Caspian, Siberia, the Russian and Scandinavian Arctic, North Africa and the Gulf of Guinea to the EU. Except, of course, that these resources do not flow of their own accord. This is not a rain catchment area in which mountain streams head downhill, joining tributaries and rivers to provide water to the city in the valley. Gas is lighter than crude, but it still requires pressure to force it down a pipeline, while political and financial forces determine the route along which it is transported. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 4.

A map from a 2009 EU Briefing Note on oil and gas pipelines in Europe.

This web of gas pipelines is centred on Brussels. Presentations by European Commission officials and gas company executives show images that make the web appear natural, geographically determined. The reality is that the web is the outcome of intense lobbying, billions of dollars of loans, and the balance of political and economic power.

Jean-Arnold Vinois of the European Commission’s Energy Directorate General and Marco Alverá, senior vice-president for the Italian oil company ENI, gave parallel dinner presentations on gas pipelines and security of supply in Brussels in October 2008. These two government and corporate leaders celebrated ‘Europe’s unique position in respect of gas’, comparing the EU’s advantageous location to that of East Asia and North America. Europe is surrounded by potential sources that are all accessible by pipelines (Alverá, 2008; Vinois, 2008).

Very long pipelines. If Azeri gas from the Caspian does reach central Europe, it will have travelled over 4000 km. This is the ‘Southern Corridor’, which ultimately is also intended to suck in gas from Iraq, Turkmenistan and Iran. Meanwhile, the proposed Trans-Sahara Gas Pipeline would run for 4300 km, northwards from the coastal Niger Delta across the entire Sahara to Algeria, before connecting with existing lines that cross the Mediterranean.

These schemes are identified and discursively framed as ‘European priority projects’ that ‘must be included in national strategic plans’ (Vinois, 2008). The term ‘energy corridor’, used in policy documents and speeches, disguises the physical spatiality of the carbonized sociotechnical systems that underlies energy mobilities and distracts from their role as pieces of one-way infrastructure that enable a long-term and locked-in resource grab of fuel from the Global South into the European gas grid. The Shah Deniz field off Baku, reserves in Turkmenistan yet to be discovered, this ploughed field at Rəhimli we are standing in – they all play a role in a particular vision of Europe’s energy future.

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From the villages and fields of western Azerbaijan, the pipeline runs through the forests and mountains of Georgia and into eastern Turkey. At the city of Erzerum, the SCP gas pipeline ends, delivering its load into the Turkish gas grid, but the BTC oil pipeline continues, running west and then south, until it completes its 1768 km journey at the oil terminal of Ceyhan on the Turkish Mediterranean coast.

1772 km – İskenderun Bay, Turkey

Deep in the belly of the Dugi Otok super-tanker, the oilers and engineers are starting up the enormous diesel engine that will propel 108,000 tonnes of steel across the water. Reaching the shipping channel, the tugs release the Dugi Otok to its own steerage. The ship’s red prow smashes through the glassy Mediterranean waters, ploughing the clear blue into a mass of white.

These tankers are the emissaries of Azeri geology, camel trains of the industrial age. Picking up where the pipeline leaves off, they distribute the dark matter across the surface of the earth. Tankers flagged in Liberia, the Isle of Man and Panama ply the oceans, delivering Caspian crude to import terminals in Italy, Chile, England, China and elsewhere. OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 5.

A fishing boat from Golovesi village passes the Dugi Otok tanker as it fills up with crude at BP's Ceyhan terminal in Turkey.

This global oil trade does not just ‘flow’ by itself. Every day, close to 100 million barrels of crude are collected from zones of extraction and delivered to points of consumption. Constructing the BTC pipeline meant more ships were built to carry the additional 1 million barrels per day. The Dugi Otok is one such vessel. Although she transports crude to many different terminals, the route from Ceyhan to Muggia, a suburb of Trieste in Italy, is a key part of her itinerary.

Once the tanker from Ceyhan arrives at Muggia Trieste in northern Italy, the crude is unloaded into a storage terminal. From here the oil is pumped 477 km through the Transalpine pipeline over the Italian and Austrian Alps, to Ingolstadt in Bavaria Built between 1963 and 1967, TAL was – like BTC 40 years later – a product of geopolitical forces, driven especially by British and US Cold War strategies. However, again like BTC, it was also driven by the commercial desires of a corporation, BP.

This mass relocation of great volumes of fossil fuels requires constant coordination of logistical and financial resources. Analysts in Geneva and London assess and counter-assess the profitability of particular shipments, aiming to maximize their return. Some deliveries are based on long-term commitments, but many others are short-term contracts betting on swings in oil prices. Shifts in local demand redirect tankers from a short Mediterranean delivery to a major voyage across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal. The paths taken across the water are less predetermined than rigid pipelines, yet there is nevertheless a global network of preferred tanker routes running across seas and oceans, through straits and canals, towards the destination ports. From Ceyhan there are two primary marine oil roads: one runs south to the Suez Canal, while the other initially heads west towards the Adriatic, the western Mediterranean or the Strait of Gibraltar.

After the Dugi Otok passes over the horizon, a second tanker, the British Hawthorn, remains moored at the terminal jetty. Both vessels are bearing Azeri crude belonging to BP, but the British Hawthorn is managed directly by the oil company – a rarity in the world of crude shipments. Usually the oil major contracts shipping companies such as the Croatian firm, Tankerska Plovidba, which manages Dugi Otok.

The British Hawthorn will head for Thailand via the Suez Canal, and she is rigged to deter the threat of ‘Somali pirates’. All BP ships travelling through the Gulf of Aden are under instruction to fix double rolls of concertina razor wire around all their decks, and carry high-pressure water and foam hoses. In the past year, fast skiffs have launched from coves along Somalia’s 3000 km of coast, carrying grappling hooks and rope ladders. Oil tankers have become high-profile targets.

The vessels and crew are usually released unharmed once a ransom is paid, but shipping associations nevertheless present themselves as a ‘system under attack’. The Gulf of Aden is defined as ‘an important energy supply route’ and a ‘vital strategic artery’ (European Union Committee, 2010). UK, US, EU and NATO forces – including the HMS Portland, a British frigate – are already prowling the waters off Somalia. Armed with Lynx helicopters, torpedoes and heavy artillery, the Portland can easily overpower the pirates’ skiffs and ‘mother ships’. It forms part of the US-led Combined Task Force 151, as do Marines, SuperCobra attack helicopters and unmanned MQ-9 Reaper drones. The Task Force is just one of various naval fleets patrolling these waters. When the British Hawthorn passes through the Gulf of Aden, she will probably register with Operation ATALANTA. This European fleet includes warships from Germany, France, Spain and Italy empowered to use ‘all necessary means’ to repress piracy (Nincic, 2009).

ATALANTA is run from Northwood HQ, an extensive underground military complex beneath an oak wood in north-west London. Many floors deep, behind steel blast-doors, Royal Navy officers coordinate the warships with nearby tanker traffic. Vessels are advised to travel in groups and at night, as ‘this enables military forces to “sanitize” the area ahead of the merchant ships’ (Maritime Security Centre, 2014). While the action takes place on the Indian Ocean, ultimate control is situated here in the bunker. Satellite imagery is beamed in from the EU Satellite Centre in Madrid, while real-time images are streamed from drones scouring the waters off Somalia, remotely piloted from Creech Air Force Base in the Nevada Desert (Turse, 2011). The communication between Northwood and the shipping companies is conducted by Merchant Navy liaison officers like Captain Colin Shoolbraid and Captain Michael Hawkins. Although they’re based in the bunkers, and are part of the military operation, neither is actually a Royal Navy officer; both are employed by BP Shipping and seconded to the navy (Chamber of Shipping, 2010).

Backed by a global military network with nodes in Madrid, Nevada, Washington, Brussels, London and the Seychelles, the British Hawthorn will traverse the waters near Somalia. If need be, the HMS Portland, Reaper drones or SuperCobra helicopters will be dispatched to ensure that this part of the oil road is ‘sanitized’.

Ingolstadt, Germany

Adenauer and Erhard are seen as the giants of the West German ‘economic miracle’, the Wirtschaftswunder, which produced an 8 percent annual growth rate throughout the 1950s and, by the end of the decade, had made the Federal Republic the most prosperous country in Europe. Oil consumption soared in Germany, growing even faster than the rest of the economy, increasing 19 percent every year between 1960 and 1965. Soon BP’s largest market outside the UK was Germany.

And yet, BP’s sales of refined petroleum products, such as petrol and aviation fuel, lagged far behind those of its competitors Shell and Standard Oil. BP’s roots lay in drilling and extraction and the Royal Navy was its primary buyer of crude. BP’s weakness in selling refined products was exacerbated in the 1950s when Iran, Iraq, Kuwait and other host governments demanded increased extraction rates. The company was forced to sell crude in bulk rather than refining it first, thereby undermining BP’s overall profitability. ⁵ Maurice Bridgeman, CEO of BP, knew that in order not to lose further ground to its rivals, the company had to grow its shipping and refining operations.

By the 1960s, Bridgeman was seriously concerned that BP could lose its position in Germany. France was following a dirigiste policy, its government backing French oil companies by preventing foreign corporations from dominating the domestic retail market. The French and Italian governments were trying to persuade Germany and other European Economic Community (EEC) member states to adopt similar policies. Based outside the EEC, BP faced the alarming prospect of losing much of its retail market in Europe (Bamberg, 2000).

Seeing West Germany as pivotal in the fight against the French-led defence of state-directed economies, BP carried out an intensive lobbying campaign in 1967. German ministers were targeted, together with British politicians with influence in Germany. Deminex, the German state-backed oil group, was even offered a share of BP’s holdings in Iran and Abu Dhabi. In May 1968, the company engaged in European parliamentary hearings, arguing ‘in favour of a liberal international economy, free from discrimination against the oil multinationals whose integrated international supply systems were … the best guarantee of security and cheapness in oil supplies’ (Bamberg, 2000).

BP used its financial capital to force more of its products into Europe and drive up demand for oil. Thus the company locked itself into a mutual dependency with certain markets. As Germany’s economy expanded and demanded more petroleum, BP helped provide it. As BP needed to increase the sales of its products, it pushed to expand the German economy. In the process, the company helped create the West Germany it needed – just as, decades later, it had a hand in shaping the Azerbaijan, Georgia and Turkey it needed. In these and many other extracting and consuming states around the world, it helped form economies and societies in a manner that enabled its maximization of profit.

The symbiosis between EU institutions, western governments and corporations in creating fuel import routes, the oil roads that run from ‘extracting states’ to ‘consuming states’, has remained remarkably constant over the decades. Yet while patterns of collusion and cooperation have remained consistent, these oil roads themselves are constantly in flux. The interaction of corporate, financial and political forces drives the creation of new energy supply routes, while others potentially may wither.

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.

On Monday 18 August 2008, the refinery closed after 43 years of operation, with the loss of many jobs. Once, it symbolized the transformation of the Upper Danube into a petrochemical futurescape; but now that vision has faded. By coincidence, 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 in Georgia, BP had stopped pumping. Yet the political earthquake in the Caucasus hardly registered as a tremor in Ingolstadt. Tankers from other ports besides Ceyhan were redirected to Muggia to maintain the flow of oil through TAL. The lack of significant impact from the temporary stoppage of the BTC pipeline belies the project’s importance. The pipeline played a crucial role in US and EU attempts to pursue energy dominance by asserting long-term influence over oil-extracting and transit regions and diversifying their sources of crude. BTC itself represents a significant 1 percent of global oil supply.

The summer 2008 closure of the Ingolstadt refinery is full of political symbolism. The refinery was sold by its owners – including BP – to an Indian company, which then proceeded to transport the entire structure, from control rooms to pipework, all the way to Haldia in West Bengal. Cracking towers and distillation plants were loaded on to river barges and floated north along canals and rivers to the North Sea. At Antwerp the plant was transferred on to ships and taken via the Suez Canal to the Bay of Bengal.

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 picture. Consumer demand for petroleum products in Europe appears to have peaked. Just as the Rothschilds found the European market for oil saturated in the 1890s and turned instead to Asia as an export market for Baku crude, so in the 21st century the primary growth region in oil demand is East Asia. BP, like its rival companies, has been working hard to break into the Indian and Chinese markets.

The sale of the Ingolstadt refinery gave BP another entry point to the Indian subcontinent (Suryamurthy, 2008). Five months prior to the closure, the company signed a Memorandum of Understanding to supply crude to the rebuilt plant in India, and to purchase all its refined products. In effect, BP outsourced the running of the refinery to a location with cheaper labour. Once operational, the Haldia refinery will supply aviation fuel and liquid petroleum gas to the nearby mega-city of Calcutta. Haldia Petrochemicals Ltd’s (HPL) website speaks of a golden future: ‘A symbol of industrial resurgence in West Bengal, HPL has led the economic growth of the region. HPL truly symbolizes its motto – “Come Grow With Us”.’ It is strikingly similar to the manner in which the new petrochemical city of Ingolstadt was described in the early 1960s.

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

Conclusion

Despite the centrality of energy in both political discourses and organization of Western European societies, Europe’s fossil-fuel grid and transportation routes – that is, the mobility systems of fuel itself – remain largely invisible. The institutions, practices and processes that create and enforce these oil roads – and gas roads – are rarely examined holistically. Only by investigating the institutional collaborations involved in energizing, or powering up societies by constructing the physical infrastructure and the social and technopolitical framework and practices to maintain it, can we better understand the reciprocal relationships between the geopolitics of fuel extraction and transportation and the pro-active pressure for increased consumption in Europe.

By examining this one route from the Caspian to Bavaria, we illustrate the carbonized practices upon which the high-energy mobility culture in Western Europe depends, and the current forces that resist any shift away from this petroculture, any ‘powering down’ of society.