http://www.tol.cz/look/TOL/article.tpl?IdLanguage=1&IdPublication=4&NrIssue=139&NrSection=4&NrArticle=15207
O, To Be Angola
by David Hogarth
27 October 2005
Too little attention has been paid to the technical obstacles to the
development of Russia's oil industry – and the implications for
foreign policy.
If Russia's oilmen could choose their weather and geography, what
would they choose? It may seem unlikely, but Angola is in many
respects the ideal source of oil. At war for many years, Angola
nonetheless always managed to get large quantities of oil to market.
Because it had oil fields offshore, its production was unaffected by
the fighting; and because it could use tankers to distribute its oil,
it could sell its oil on almost any market, enabling it to react
rapidly to changes in market prices.
Unlike Angola, Russia cannot produce oil with relative ease and get it
to almost any market it chooses. That might be hard to guess by
reading optimistic academic theories about Russia's potential as an
energy giant. But for some time now, the technical evidence available
has indicated that Russia's environment is a fundamental obstacle to
the development of its oil industry. Even so, engineers still have
problems convincing social scientists about the gravity of their
findings – not because the evidence is hard to understand but more
perhaps because the data often contradicts established theories.
Richly endowed with black gold (estimates of Siberia's oil reserves
hover around 100 billion barrels) and bordering many of the world's
great or emerging markets, Russia does on paper have huge potential to
supply the world and make its citizens richer. However, geography
makes its potential hard to realize and almost impossible to realize
efficiently. Moreover, while oil may give Russia strategic strength,
it also leaves Russia exposed.
TOO LITTLE FROST, TOO MUCH ICE
This is not, of course, the first time that Russia's weather has been
underestimated. "In general, people exaggerate the climate here,"
wrote Marshall Davout during Napoleon's wretched 1812 campaign. It was
also in part because of the environment that Russia's energy resources
were left largely stranded during the Soviet era.
Technology has advanced since then, but for two reasons, Russia's
weather remains a huge engineering and logistical problem for the
energy industry. Indeed, it is becoming increasingly unpredictable and
testing. Like the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, all Siberian pipelines are
built on permafrost. Unfortunately, though, permafrost is no longer so
permanent. As global temperatures rise, the permafrost is starting to
melt. This phenomenon is confounding traditional construction
techniques and is turning concrete foundations into tectonic plates.
The stress could cause new and existing pipelines to subside, buckle,
or in the worst case to topple over, with potentially serious
environmental consequences. A ruptured pipeline at Nyagan in 1993
narrowly missed fouling the Sosvinsky Nature Preserve; a year later
another accident, at Usa, heavily polluted the Pechora and Kolva
rivers.
Secondly, the calm, warm African waters off Angola are a world away
from the realities of Russia's ports. Mainland Russia's only ports
serving Europe – Murmansk, Kogulev Island, and Varandey – all lie
along the coast of the Barents Sea, in the Arctic. The best time to
load is, of course, the summer, but even then it is extremely
difficult. At the Varandey oil terminal, for example, crude oil is
pumped aboard tankers through an underwater pipe that has to be
manually connected to the ships' hulls by teams of frogmen. In winter,
empty tankers usually have to make several slow runs at protruding ice
shelves before they shave off enough ice to get close to the loading
point. The crude oil is then poured aboard from a mobile
sledge-mounted pump that has been pulled over the ice. Unfortunately,
pumps regularly go for a walk: the ice sheets have a tendency to break
up during the loading process, causing the makeshift terminal to float
away, dragging men behind it, and leaving hoses spurting oil into the
air. (Oil trapped under ice is the bane of oil-spill response teams.
Cleaning it up is dangerous and the inevitable residual oil that
cleaners can't reach keeps re-emerging during thaws. Oil may be a
biodegradable product, but the low Arctic temperatures cause it to
congeal and solidify both on land and in the water.) Once loaded,
tankers reach the open sea by following in the wake of icebreakers.
There are similar difficulties in the east. A recent study by Plymouth
University on Japan's energy shipping policy argues that, because of
the extreme conditions and the unsuitability of loading terminals, it
will not be viable to extract oil from one key project on Sakhalin
Island that could have been a major source of oil for Japan.
In the south, geography seems more promising, since, in Novorosiisk,
Russia has a warm-water port. But that promise has faded. The
Bosphorus Straits that separate Europe from Asia are a bottleneck.
Delays are common and significant even at current capacity; in future,
limitations on tankers (and also on Black Sea pipelines) may become
tighter because of environmental concerns. Those concerns may
eventually be reflected in law, since Turkey's bid for European Union
membership will oblige it to adopt EU environmental law.
In other words, Russia's efforts to get oil to market from the Arctic
are undermined by thawing ice and largely trapped by ice floes and, in
the Black Sea, stuck in a bottleneck in the highly sensitive marine
environment.
THE DEPENDENT ENERGY SUPERPOWER
To make full use of its potential, Russia needs to find solutions to
the difficulties of distributing its oil. Technologically, that is
currently difficult; politically it may prove even more complicated.
There must also be a question about Russia's willingness to engage
with that challenge, since it has for many years neglected even its
existing energy distribution infrastructure. The capacity of its trunk
"source-to-port" pipelines is low, restricting export potential.
Russia's leader, though, does not seem particularly concerned.
President Putin has so far declined to spend money on upgrading the
pipeline network of state-owned Transneft, which distributes 93
percent of Russia's oil. Badly corroded and unreliable (over 300 leaks
were recorded in its western Siberian pipelines in 2002), the network
also lacks the ability to separate the different grades of crude oil
traveling through it. The network therefore produces a sub-standard
mongrel blend called "Urals oil" that, not surprisingly, sells for
less than benchmark crude. The oil is again mixed with a cocktail of
additives to stop it from "waxing" (a process in which paraffin in the
oil begins to solidify and can clog up the pipe) in sub-zero
temperatures. The oil is worth less but costs more to refine than
benchmark crude, because the additives must then be removed from the
oil. An upgrade of the system is vital to ensuring Russian oil is
competitive.
Still, while seemingly unwilling to invest in vital technology,
Russia's leaders have outlined a geopolitical strategy. Yevgeny
Primakov, prime minister and foreign minister in the Yeltsin era,
advocated a strategic reorientation towards India and China partly to
reduce dependence on the West and also partly because he envisaged
pipelines carrying oil (and gas) to these huge markets. Putin
initially embraced Primakov's policies, but after 9/11 he turned
westward. Now he is warming up relations with India and China again,
and Iran too is a strategic focus.
These kinds of solutions to Russia's problems of distribution are
extremely problematic. Russia's relationship with Western Europe has
been relatively predictable (and that probably helps explain Putin's
pro-Western record), but relations with former communist states
continue to be complicated by wariness and scandals (including the
alleged attempt by a former KGB agent to bribe a Polish minister and
buy a state-owned Polish oil refinery at a knockdown price). Ukraine's
new pro-Western, pro-NATO orientation raises question marks in Moscow,
while a stronger embrace of Belarus would reinforce Western
reservations about Russia's course.
And to the east lie two huge economies capable of consuming all the
oil that Russia currently produces: Japan and China. Earlier this
year, Putin indicated that a pipeline that could have run to Japan via
the eastern port of Nakhodka would instead run to Daqing in northern
China. Putin then reneged on his promise to deliver oil directly to
Daqing. Now, it seems, oil will be sent to China by rail, a
complicated process that requires a change of rolling stock at the
Chinese border since Russian and Chinese trains have different gauges.
Still, trains – the clumsy and relatively inefficient land equivalent
of tankers – at provide Russia some flexibility in its energy policy.
Putin's wavering over the Daqing pipeline highlights the fundamental
strategic problem associated with pipelines. As is often seen with
other parts of the former Soviet Union, pipelines can easily create a
relationship of dependence – but it is a dependence that also ties the
producer to the customer. In the absence of a large-capacity
warm-water port, the best that Russia can perhaps do to avoid
dependence is to diversify its customer base.
That may not be possible given the technical, geographical, and
political obstacles. Even in the best-case scenario, however, Russia's
potential diversification is limited to a relatively small clutch of
countries. As such, no diversification would enable Russia's energy
policy to be purely price-driven. To divert oil from one important
neighbor to another important neighbor becomes a political decision.
To increase oil deliveries to one rather than the other could be taken
as a measure of the relative strength of geostrategic relations. An
energy superpower it may be, but pipeline politics will ensure that
the foreign-policy agenda of Russia's president will be tricky,
nervous, and ambiguous.
If you are hunting al-Qaida, start in Angola, see qaeda link:
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=al-Qaida%20in%20Angola
Training Camps:
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=al-Qaida%20training%20camps%20in%20Angola
Diamonds, Oil, Weapons:
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Russia%20in%20Angola
Interesting:
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Angola%20Russia%20al-Qaida%20connection
CUBA and Russia Military train the Angola military.
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Russian%20military%20in%20Angola
I know little about Angola, and had no idea that Cuba has been involved there 45 years and had a military contract with Angola, or so many men there.
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Cuba%20Angola%20connection
http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q=Cuban%20bases%20in%20Angola
Good read and important!