A tiny hole in the pipe
One of those strange synchronistic moments came this evening as I flipped through the channels. On a local news outlet, the report that the refinery across the river had a slight leak, due to a fissure in a pipeline. Ever since yesterday afternoon, when someone happened to notice some new black on white detailing on a hillside heading down toward the river, the crews have been working hard to “pick up” an estimated 8000 litres of viscous oil. [[On February 01, the refinery updated their estimate to 200,000 litres; time to replace the calculator battery]]
I don’t know how the estimate would be done; perhaps someone said “Here’s a number that won’t upset too many listeners”. Any time I’ve spilled stuff in the kitchen, I’ve had the benefit of knowing how big my original container might have been. What do you do with a pipeline, containing something approaching an infinite volume if the pumps keep up to the demand. I live in Canada where the media never tells lies, and I’m sure the mess will be gone in “a matter of a few days”. A drop in the bucket or somesuch.
On to another channel, with a documentary on the construction of a pipeline across more troubled but no less beautiful territory. The BTC pipeline through Azerbaijan and Georgia will (does?, as the documentary was completed some years back) will carry a steady stream of crude down to a terminal on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. 1760 kilometers of steel, buried under a few centimeters of soil along a known pathway through some very unstable territory. Unstable, both geologically and politically.
“If the quake doesn’t get you, the war might” would be a reasonable advertising slogan for this pipeline. It seems that the route passes in the general area of a number of ongoing conflicts, the kind involving bombs and guns and angry men. A pipeline bringing oil to the Western world just might attract the kind of attention that keeps the authorities on a thin edge of tense thought.
The scenery is beautiful through that area (based on the video footage) and it would be tragic if the “is” became “was”. An intended flow of a million barrels of crude each day is enough to give new meaning to my phrase “black on white detailing”. Even more importantly, there are thousands of villages where a hope of “a new economy” is tied to the completion of the pipeline. As one man put it, their region is about a century behind the Western world in development. By the time the pipeline runs dry they might have caught up to where we are now. Or perhaps not… the supply of oil is generously overestimated in many places; after all, we can’t actually “see” the deposits, until we spill them or use them up.
Pipelines are the aqueducts of modern times. Like those stone ruins in parts of Europe from earlier attempts to transport water, we may have thousands of kilometers of dry steel tubing for future generations to photograph as historic remains of a long-disappeared culture.
