Oil Is Our Treasure

Last week's post about the Timor Sea oil rig was illustrated with a photo from Pirallahi Island, Azerbaijan. Seeing that again inspired me to judiciously tone map five photos from there (two above, all five larger after the jump) to illustrate this story of our visit there, in June of 2006:

The drilling towers, in groups of twos and threes, mostly long abandoned, cast skeletal shadows on the scrub and brown of the earth, sometimes on pools of oil or grease.  Occasionally, heavy metal poles jutted from the ground. If they were longer they would have converged. I guessed these are drilling masts either begun but abandoned, or which had fallen or been dismantled, and the rest of which had been carried off.

In one spot along the causeway that connects the Abseron peninsula to the island of Artyom, now renamed Pirallahi, an abandoned drilling mast stood alongside the broken bases of others, and their rusty remnants laid on their sides in the water beside them.

A man stopped his car. His passenger climbed out and glared at us as I took pictures of the gloom. Oil spread at random in shallow pools, and it wasn’t clear if it was there through neglect or if it rises spontaneously from the earth.

The remains of concrete buildings had crumbled to expose rebar. The equipment itself, even if the “nodding donkeys” were still slowly pumping, was rusted brown through and through, and the entire enterprise stretched nearly as far as the eye could see. Some drilling rigs were tied down with guy wires, and they combined with high tension power lines to describe a crazy random etching of lines across the haze, which was merely a lighter shade of the blue-brown earth.

When a bore hole doesn’t produce adequately, one way to get more oil is to employ a submersible pump. The part visible above the ground is the familiar “nodding donkey.” The entire assembly is called a rod pump or beam pump, or thirsty bird. A power line ran over to each rod pump that still slowly raised and lowered its head, with a transformer on a pole, tied to it in the crudest way. A salt pan stood lined with household trash – maybe because of tidal action.

Two rough green trucks lumbered through this mess; One looked implausibly like a logging truck, with big metal brackets at the front and at back, which trailed a distance behind. The truck following held some pumping device on its flat bed. The back left of the bed was jacked up way higher, so that the whole rear slanted awkwardly down to the right. But it had six brand new, formidably-treaded tires.

People actually lived in two places on Pirallahi, at the village of Artyom at the northern tip, and at Ostrov Artema, a collection of block housing.  Here an old round bus gasped for air at the curb. It was blue and white, with blue curtains pulled completely shut in each of the four windows down its side. All the windows were surrounded with corrosion, and streaks of dried rust ran down the bus from the bottom of each.

Occasionally, hundreds of meters apart, there would stand a tree, or two, and a low fence surrounding a tin-roofed building that looked, improbably, to be somebody’s house. Pipes ran along the salt pans, and the road, and off the island along the causeway, and coming and going, signs, paint peeling, quoted Heydar Aliyev: Oil Is Our Treasure, and Azerbaijan’s Future Is Bright Through Oil.

 

 

 

See more photos in the Azerbaijan Gallery at EarthPhotos.com.