(Map source: Energy Information Administration)
"We are not aware of any plans for ships to go to Poti today," said an official at the US embassy in Tbilisi, who declined to be named.
AFP, Wednesday 27 August 2008
You too may be concerned about US warships making a "contested" port call in a hostile zone, where the "hostiles" are not Sioux or Zulus or Boxers or some other primitively armed peoples but nuclear-arsenalled Russians. Hopefully the ships will stay away Thursday and eventually find a safer place to offload their supplies. Remember last spring when Burmese authorities forbade warships to land humanitarian supplies? Then, the risk of armed confrontation was deemed to be too high, and the ships sailed off. Why has the calculation changed when the shore parties might be facing off with the world's second nuclear power, not just a Burmese junta? Time to read Flynt and Hillary Mann Leverett's "Wrong On Russia" in the National Interest.
If you are concerned about the potential for mayhem that the Russia-Georgia dispute represents for the wider world, then consider the timely article that two Bilkent University (Turkey) professors, Paul A. Williams and Ali Tekin, have written in the Summer 2008 issue of The Middle East Journal: "The Iraq War, Turkey, and Renewed Caspian Energy Prospects" (paid subscription). The above map shows you the general neighborhood, but the MEJ article goes a step further and provides a CIA map that traces the several existing and planned oil and gas pipelines that crisscross the region. It analyzes the interplay between Middle Eastern and Caspian energy sources, the ebb and flow of investment - and great power interest - depending on which region is more likely to go up in flames (or where the embers are starting to cool).
If there are a couple of acronyms to remember when you next argue about what's at stake in the Caucasus, the most important might be BTC, SCO, and SOFA.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC, linking the Caspian oilfields of Baku with the "safe" Turkish Mediterranean port of Ceyhan, via Tbilisi, the Georgian capital) pipeline carries 1 million barrels of oil per day. It was not attacked by the Russians in the recent fighting. The port of Poti (where those American ships declined to dock yesterday) was attacked by the Russians, and it is the terminus for a petro-rail connection from Azerbaijan, which, along with British Petroleum (BP), suspended deliveries to the Georgian port of Batumi* at the outset of the conflict. Maybe TV images of billowing flames when a Georgian oil train hit a mine sufficed to show how vulnerable the country is as a transit route.
According to Pavel Baiev, energy expert at Sweden's SIPRI (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute), "After the conflict with Russia, Georgia can no longer be considered as a secure transit route. Which means that there will be no construction of new pipelines" (quoted in Le Journal de Dimanche 24 August; my translation). Not good news for a European Union which wants to diversify its natural gas and oil supplies and lessen dependence on Mother Russia. But, as the Leveretts write:
The West cannot “work around” this situation with pipe dreams about new pipelines, like the European Union’s Nabucco project, for which there are insufficient non-Russian gas volumes to make them economically viable. Shortly before he moved from Russia’s presidency to its premiership earlier this year, Putin said that Europe and the United States could build Nabucco and any other pipelines they wanted. But, he asked rhetorically, where would they get the gas to fill them? In the end, Europe cannot provide for its own energy security without a deep and productive partnership with Russia.
As it happens, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO, which includes China and Russia and the Central Asian countries in between) is meeting this week in Dushanbe, Tajikistan. China, which has separatist regions of its own, was not as supportive as Russia would have wanted, according to this report in the Financial Times. But let's not be overjoyed at Chinese reticence this time: China and Russia share thousands of miles of border country, and Russia has what China needs: energy supplies. Any permanent organization that puts Russia, China, and a slew of energy rich-istans in potential opposition to NATO, the EU, and the West needs careful monitoring.
Which brings me to that other acronym, SOFA, as in Status of Forces Agreement, the downplayed "technical" term for those talks with the pesky Iraqi government, which has been trying to extract timetables out of an Administration that supposedly abhors such things. With Caspian oil & gas and Caucasus transit routes in such a nasty neighborhood, wouldn't you think that Condoleeza "Chevron" Rice and Dick "Halliburton" Cheney will have George W. "Harken" Bush's ear when they underline the petro-security nature of the Georgian crisis? And how the Iraq SOFA, in addition to ensuring that the APO postal service for US troops left behind in those "enduring" bases can deliver duty-free PX goods, might just also include some "enduring" oil deals for American firms (send those campaign donations here, please).
Hopefully those US Navy ships will keep a safe distance from Russian missiles and mines, even if someone in Swiftboat campaign HQ might be secretly relieved by an October Surprise. But the August South Ossetia crisis - and its denouement - should not have been a surprise to anyone with even a smidgen of recent historical knowledge. As Neal Ascherson pointed out in the 17 August Observer:
Might Bush, Cheney, and Rice have been blinded by that bane of this Administration, the siren smell of oil? If BTC is in danger, and if the SCO is a club we can't join, then maybe SOFA again becomes their most important acronym of all. But don't count on this Oil Administration for wise geo-strategic thinking. If anything, the Georgia-Russia crisis should tell us that less is more, as in oil dependency.
*Batumi, the same Georgian port where a Coast Guard cutter docked the other day; can't they be kept in the Gulf of Mexico, just in case the US states of Georgia or Louisiana get hit again by a natural disaster? Remember when the Louisiana National Guard was off in Iraq when Katrina hit?
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Posted by: drilling rigs | April 15, 2009 at 21:34