Targeting the Pipeline

Until now, the notion that the battle in Georgia had an oil component was an educated conclusion, in my case based on the 11 years I spent living in the region, including in Tbilisi during the 1990s. Now we have two independent reports, including one this morning by my former Wall Street Journal colleague Guy Chazan, confirming that Russia took advantage of its assault to tell the West that the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline isn't necessarily safe.

(Credit where credit is due: Damien McElroy of The Daily Telegraph actually had the story first. But the WSJ had the foresight to publish an actual photograph, so that there is no parsing the facts now.)

The WSJ report says that the attack, coming within 10 feet of the Baku-Ceyhan line, occurred last Saturday. Here is Chazan's description:

"The line of craters left by the alleged Russian attacks runs through the middle of a hilly, mostly uninhabited plain some 15 miles south of Tbilisi, near the town of Rustavi. The area lacks military or even human targets. The only sign of civilization is a small farm surrounded by haystacks and grazing herds of cows and sheep. The 45 craters -- each some 60 feet across -- scar the hillside like footprints left by a giant."

On Tuesday, a jet returned and appeared to bomb a nearby smaller oil pipeline that terminates at Supsa, a port on Georgia's Black Sea coast.

The goal? As Chazan states well: "Russia wasn't only aiming to humiliate its neighbor militarily but also to damage its reputation as an energy corridor."

Georgia has no appreciable oil or natural gas. But the U.S. got behind it under the Clinton administration as a corridor for 1 million barrels a day of oil, plus considerable volumes of natural gas.

The United States originally intended the corridor as a way to weaken Russia's hold on its traditional colonial south. The strategy has been to take away the countries into which it normally expands: Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. That explains the U.S. support for NATO expansion. And it explains the so-called East-West Energy Corridor, of which Georgia is part.

The bombings did not strike the actual lines. But they demonstrated that Russia can, and might, do so.

Photo: Guy Chazan, The Wall Street Journal

It's Official: The Caspian is a Terrorist Target

The surprise isn't that terrorists appear to be responsible for an explosion that has shut down the Baku-Ceyhan oil pipeline, and sent world oil prices up. It's that no such attack occurred earlier in the Caspian Sea region.

On Tuesday, a pump near the eastern Turkish town of Refahiye blew up. The thousand-mile pipeline, which connects the Caspian and Mediterranean seas and ships a million barrels of oil a day, could be shut for two weeks.

A Kurdish rebel group known as the PKK says it's responsible for the explosion.

If accurate, the attack underlines the vast target presented by the energy infrastructure that's gone up on both sides of the Caspian, and on into Turkey, since the 1991 Soviet collapse.

During the 11 years I lived on the Caspian, I frequently asked oilmen and diplomats about any precautions being undertaken to prevent terrorism, say, at the Tengiz and Kashagan oilfields in Kazakhstan, and the offshore Baku fields in Azerbaijan. After all, the Caspian is just north of Afghanistan and Pakistan, with all that implies. These fields currently export about 1.3 million barrels of oil a day, and the volume will increase to about 4 million barrels a day in about a decade or so.

I never got back anything but blank stares. I assumed that meant the threat was understood, but that no one was going to discuss preventive measures in place.

But this week's blast makes me wonder. BP deliberately built the pipeline underground, mostly to prevent the siphoning off of oil by thieves, and to forestall attacks by the various militant groups that populate the Caucasus and Turkey.

The vulnerable spots were always the eight pump stations along the route -- they are completely in the open. NATO and the U.S. had sent trainers to help assemble a strong protective force for the entire infrastructure, and I had assumed they were particularly concentrated at the pump stations.

Security may be particularly tight at the stations. But the apparent attack shows that the infrastructure remains vulnerable.