Mapping the carbon web

It was about four million years ago that a host of plankton and plants was deposited in a sandy rock formation. The sediments lie now beneath the Caspian Sea, offshore from Baku in Azerbaijan. Over the millions of years, the plankton and plants have been compressed into oil, and these ancient sediments have become the focus of intense human attention - engineering, financial, geopolitical ...

'It takes minutes for pressured oil from the Pliocene sandstone layer to move up the riser to the drill deck of the Central Azeri platform in the Caspian' (p330). From the platform, the oil is piped ashore, then piped again from Baku west across Azerbaijan, through Georgia, then down across Turkey to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, then on to a tanker to Muggia in the northern Adriatic, then piped again, north to the vast industrial complex of southern Germany, before being distributed to its various moments of refining, processing and use. Some of it, James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello tell us, 'is refined into aviation fuel and supplied to airports such as Munich, where it might fill the tanks of a 747 bound for India' (p330).

It takes twenty-two days. Vertically, the oil travels from five kilometres below the Caspian sea-level to ten above it, in the plane bound for India. 'Horizontally', from oilfield to airport, it travels over 5000 kilometres - 'twenty-two days for geology laid down 4 million years ago to be incinerated into gas. The energy of those rocks takes minutes for the engines to burn' (p330).

This is what is meant by non-renewable energy.

The Oil Road tracks the journey of that oil, especially through its ten days in the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, negotiated and built in the last quarter century. It tracks it in detail, forensically, on the ground, the authors following the route themselves, digging up in each place long histories of settlement, migration, geopolitics, struggle, negotiation, war. They meet up and travel with fellow campaigners, they interview many who have been involved in this vast project, and they acknowledge as they go the materiality of the landscapes through which this journey takes them - and which the oil's journey has so often disrupted - the birds, the trees, the mountains, the villages, the pastures. And the careers built, and the lives torn apart.

As they travel the linear route, the authors also build up a far more complex geography, both vast and intricate, of what they call the 'carbon web': that incredible intermeshing of engineering, finance, military security, banks, oil companies, consultants, public bodies, universities, national governments, NGOs, lawyers, that is necessary for a project such as this to happen. At each moment it is contested and conflictual. The old woman who is terrified of the oil passing beneath her house and orchard, the people who can no longer reach their high summer pastures because they are cut off by a security-zone around the pipe, the people displaced or still fighting for compensation ... all are caught up in the effects of this tentacular carbon web. The Oil Road documents all this in absorbing detail.

The book is part of the long engagement by art/activism/research group Platform with the complexities and effects of our oil-based economy. The research behind it has stretched over years (in even the smallest places they encounter 'old friends', people they have visited before, campaigned with, learned from). This is a tale of investigative persistence too, of tracking memos, submitting freedom-of-information enquiries, pondering the significance of details, of making the physically demanding journey itself. It is also self-aware, occasionally standing back to worry that the very process of exposure might put people in harm's way. Many academic researchers should be in awe of this.

From the detail, a number of recurring issues give rise to further thought. There is much here, for instance, about the construction of national(ist) identities and the role oil projects (and companies) can play in it. There is the issue of companies' 'social licence to operate' - the way...