The Global Game of Oil Pipelines

Gulshan Dietl

• Editorial: Routledge India
• Año: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000505597
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: International Relations

Oil has long been and will continue to be at the centre of the global economy. This book explores the oil trade, energy (geo)politics, and new trends in regionalising or globalising the oil industry in the new era of international relations and economic competition.

Energy pipelines carrying oil and gas from the well-head to the market, generally run through two or more states; and often from one continent to the other. This book maps the oil flowing through international and intercontinental pipelines and unravels the political, commercial and technological considerations behind the mapping of oil routes and forging of trade ties between nation-states. Through case studies from the major oil-exporting regions like Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, the USA, Canada and Russia, it analyses the changing trends in their policies around oil trade, bilateral relations, energy, and security. It also considers the environmental protests around the continued dependency on oil, the teapot refineries under the Islamic State, investments, oil lobbies and insurrections to understand the broad picture of shifting regional and geopolitical realities and the scramble for vital resources.

This comprehensive book will be of interest to students of the geopolitics of energy, international relations, security and strategic studies, energy studies as well as the media and with policymakers.

PART I

Oil and the pipelines

1

THE UNDERGROUND GENIE

Origin and the coming end of oil

DOI: 10.4324/9781003201649-3

The petroleum industry also has a self-generated mystique which gives us a misleading impression of its prowess: its new oil fields are invariably referred to as ‘vast’; potential US petroleum resources are always described as ‘fabulous’ or ‘boundless’; and it is usually hinted that the ‘largest’ strikes are yet to be made. The machismo of the oil industry is faltering these days; but its youthful feats and inimitable braggadocio are now more a part of the problem than part of the solution to the problem.¹

The expansion of the business thereafter – encompassing everything from wildcat drillers, smooth-talking promoters, and domineering entrepreneurs to highly trained scientists, and engineers, great corporate bureaucracies, and state-owned companies – embodies the evolution of business, of corporate strategy, of technological change and market development, and indeed both national and international economies. Throughout the history of oil, deals have been done and momentous decisions have been made – among men, companies, and nations – sometimes with great calculation and sometimes almost by accident. No other business so starkly and extremely defines the meaning of risk and reward – and profound impact of chance and fate.²

The aforementioned quotes appear to be at great variance with each other. The first sums up the mystique around the oil industry in terms like vast, fabulous and largest. The second deconstructs it into the actors that make it up, the drillers, the promoters, the entrepreneurs, the scientists, the engineers, the bureaucracies and the companies. Interestingly, even the second one has had to use terms like momentous, great, stark, extreme and profound! The two together help to comprehend the enormity of the oil universe.

Genie is a spirit in Arabian folklore. It is traditionally depicted as imprisoned within a bottle or an oil lamp, and capable of granting wishes when summoned by a mortal possessing its container.³ One Thousand and One Nights,⁴ compiled over ancient and medieval eras, is the most popular treasure trove of genie magic. Does the genie get back inside the bottle/lamp once the command is carried out? You cannot put the genie back into the bottle, it is said. The modern-day genie has emerged from the underground bringing huge manna to the people who happen to be living over the ground. The present incarnation of the genie can also not be put back into the bowels of the earth. Unlike the ancient genie that might still be floating around somewhere, the modern one is getting depleted with consumption, though some may still remain underground, if the environmental consideration prevails.

Introduction

The word ‘petroleum’ comes from the Greek Petra (rock) and Oleum (oil). It is oil from the rock vis-à-vis the traditional animal fat or plant extract. Oil is composed of carbon atoms and hydrogen atoms. The hydrogen atom is highly reactive and binds readily with other elements. With oxygen, it produces water, with nitrogen it is ammonia and with carbon it is hydrocarbon: coal, oil and gas. Oil is a generic term that includes crude oil, condensates, natural gas liquids, refinery feedstocks and additives, other hydrocarbons (including emulsified oils, synthetic crude oil, mineral oils extracted from bituminous minerals such as oil shale, bituminous sand and oils from CTL and GTL); also, petroleum products like refinery gas, ethane, LPG, aviation gasoline, motor gasoline, jet fuels, kerosene, gas/diesel oil, heavy fuel oil, naphtha, white spirit, lubricants, bitumen, paraffin waxes and petroleum coke. Besides, oil is used to produce plastics, ink, paint, shoe polish, nylons, tires, candles and many more industrial and household goods. Oil contains toxic substances like sulphur and nitrogen, and aromatics like benzene, toluene and xylene.⁵ Oil, therefore, is a highly toxic material to humans as well as to the environment.

The oil discovery begins with the geologist, who locates the oil-rich terrain in a variety of ways with an ever-advanced technology. The seismic devices send sound waves to the rock and measure the waves returned to them. The rate at which sound waves pass through solids, liquids and gases is very different. Geologists can determine what substance is under a rock by measuring the sound wave that is reflected back to them. The satellite imagery indicates the presence of oil below the surface. Additional tools like magnetometers and gravity meters are also used. The former measures change in the earth’s magnetic field and the latter its gravitational field, both of which can be attributed to oil flow. The ‘Sniffer’ machines detect the presence of hydrocarbons. And the extremely sensitive microphones create some sort of shock waves to record the sound waves reflected back from many layers of rock. Sound waves travel fastest through solids and slowest through gases, so measuring how quickly the sound wave was reflected would identify the object underneath the rock. Shock waves are produced through the use of a compressed-air gun, which shoots air into the water, or thumper trucks, which slam plates against the ground. Explosives can also be used, detonated underground or thrown into the water.⁶

Once the oil is located, a hole is drilled or dug in the earth from which oil flows or is pumped. The underground pressure in the oil reservoir is sufficient to force the oil to the surface. As the underground pressure falls, a secondary method of oil recovery is employed in the form of injecting water or gas into the bottom of the well. Thereafter, ‘Enhanced Oil Recovery’ (EOR) technologies are applied. One such approach is to utilise thermal heat to thin heavy oil so that it flows more easily to the surface. A second approach employs carbon dioxide to force ‘stranded’⁷ oil to the surface. It takes so much energy to utilise these approaches that it does not take very long before the cost of recovering the oil is equal to the value of the oil itself.⁸

The next level of oil recovery is fracking. It is the process of injecting sand, water and chemicals into shale rocks to crack them open and release the hydro-carbons trapped inside. It is a sort of controlled earthquake.⁹

The story of oil recovery is fascinating. Initially, it was easy; like squeezing a sponge. Progressively, the extraction had to be done at deeper and deeper layers. The offshore discoveries led to extraction under water, under deeper and deeper waters and further and further from land. It has been a journey from squeezing the sponge to breaking the mountains and churning the oceans. Fracking is the latest step in mankind’s search for energy.

The underground reservoirs yield crude oil ranging from black to brown to yellow in colour that is refined into a variety of petroleum products which are then distributed and sold for different uses. The refinery is thus a strategic processing facility in the petroleum fuel cycle. Additions to refinery capacity, control of the output mix and refinery location are therefore decisions with important political, as well as economic, implications. Refineries may be located either close to markets, in which case tankers or pipelines are used to transport crude oil from producing fields, or they could be located close to the producing region. Oil refineries are more widely distributed geographically and have a greater diversity of ownership than either oil reserves or transport facilities.¹⁰

Evolution through millennia

A short graphic description of a millennia-long process goes like this:

The main building block of life on the planet is an element called carbon. Together with water, it made up the single cells of the planet’s early life-forms. These cells eventually found a way to create energy that was so ingenious that many cells copied it without significant evolutionary improvements for several billion years. The cells took carbon dioxide, combined it with water, and built complex molecules called carbohydrates, giving off the gas oxygen in the process. All that was needed for this to happen was light – no problem with an enormous sun in the solar system – and a certain vaguely magical pigment in the cell. We call this process photosynthesis. Having photosynthesized, the planet’s early life-forms could burn the carbohydrate in their cells to produce useful energy, releasing carbon-dioxide and water again. A simple loop that creates energy along the way.¹¹

This energy is sourced either from fossils or from non-fossil resources. Oil, together with gas and coal, is fossil energy. As the name suggests, it is extracted from the fossils embedded in the rocks. There are three main types of rocks: igneous rocks, metamorphic rocks and sedimentary rocks. The term ‘igneous’ comes from Latin Ignis, meaning fire. The igneous rocks are also called volcanic, from the Latin Vulcan, the God of Fire. These rocks are formed as a result of the cooling and solidifying of magma or lava. The metamorphic rocks, as the term suggests, are the rocks that are metamorphosed. The process involves tremendous heat and enormous pressure causing profound physical and chemical change. They could also be the result of the movement of tectonic plates, in which case the pressure is horizontal. Both sedimentary and igneous rocks, as well as meta-morphic rocks themselves, may undergo the process of such transformation.

It is the sedimentary rocks that yield oil. The sedimentary rocks were formed a few hundred million years ago from the decomposed remains of plants and primitive life forms that got deposited on land or on the bottom of ancient lakes, lagoons, deltas, seas and oceans. Some precipitated salt can also form sediments. Over the course of millions of years, the sediments got mixed with mud and silt, forming organic-rich layers of sediments, called kerogen, a solid tarlike organic material. As sediments kept accumulating, kerogens were buried deeper with compression and heat transforming into source rocks.¹² At temperatures between 450 and 600 degrees Celsius, kerogen releases vapours forming precursors of fluid hydrocarbons that yield oil, gasoline and other petroleum products.¹³

The hydrocarbons might have remained in the source rock but usually would have moved from the high-pressure environment in which they had formed to lower pressure regions closer to the surface. The hydrocarbon migration through rock pores and cracks must have stopped against some impermeable rock layer where the hydrocarbons remain today. In varying proportions, sandstone, clay and limestone account for 99 percent of the sedimentary rocks in the earth’s crust. In spite of their prevalence, sedimentary rocks represent only 1/20th of the total volume of the continental crust’s upper layer, which is 16-kilometre thick.

If the source rock is pushed too far and becomes too hot, the petroleum is either cracked into gas or simply destroyed. The creation of coal is similar to that of petroleum with a key difference: whereas coal derives mainly from dead plants, petroleum’s raw ingredient is mainly animal. Animals contain more fat tha...

Índice

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents Page
• List of figures Page
• List of abbreviations Page
• Introduction
• Part I Oil and the pipelines
• Part II The gulf: oil epicentre
• Part III Pipelines and protests
• Part IV Richly endowed, stringently restrained
• Conclusions: past, present and prognosis
• Bibliography
• Index