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Politics and Pipelines
8 September 2008
THE oil business may be a deeply political one - but it isn't often oil workers find themselves in the middle of a major political crisis.
Dramatically that was the case for Hydratight's Caspian technicians Elmir Ibrahimov and Tarlan Aliyev, who were working in Georgia on the politically-sensitive Baku-Tibilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline when the recent Russian incursion began.
Hydratight team leaders Jeff Stewart, regional leader for Russia and Caspian, and Azerbaijan operations manager Andy Young, based at the eastern end of the 1,700km pipeline in Baku, Azerbaijan - won the BP contract to offer expertise on a bolt-tensioning problem, to help the project stay on schedule. They dispatched technicians Elmir and Tarlan, who were ferried 100km to the site in the Kordiana Mountains by helicopter from Tbilisi.
After working on the project for a month the pair were evacuated at short notice, along with BP staff, from all pipeline work in the region when the Russian Army moved into Georgia.
"We had to make the trip out by truck, to the Azerbaijani border," explained Elmir. "We couldn't use the chopper because by that time things were tense and it might have been mistaken for military transport.
"It sounds pretty hairy now, but at the time we just had to get on with things and do as much as we could."
The team was working alongside BP staff in a fragile, environmentally sensitive Georgian national park, in an area that suffers -30 degrees Centigrade temperatures in winter.
The project involves the installation of emergency drain-down facilities along the pipeline. These allow sections of the line - buried 10 metres underground - to be emptied if holed or subject to some other failure. Draining down the pipe in an emergency prevents major spillage and environmental damage.
Work teams are now back in Georgia - though this time they travelled not through Tbilisi but across the Turkish border and overland from west Georgia
BP project managers were so impressed with Hydratight's work the team has now been asked to handle work on two new pumping stations, starting in September 2008
The pipeline runs from the Caspian Sea, where it serves the giant Caspian oilfields, across Azerbaijan and Georgia into Turkey, where it ends at Ceyhan on the Mediterranean.
