January 2010 Archives

Gazprom faces regular opprobrium for its bullying ways of using energy as a pressure and political tool. Seen by some, mostly Russians, as the symbol of a successful and strong Russia, others see it as a dominating juggernaut, economic right arm of the Kremlin implementing, or should we say, imposing its policies by using energy as a weapon.

Just like Louis XIV used to say "L'Etat c'est moi" (I am the State), Gazprom could say the same in light of its commercial power and the unconditional governmental backing it enjoys. However, just like Monsanto generates passionate debates with its genetically engineered seeds, Gazprom's activities cannot be simply labeled as right or wrong and subject to final judgments.

Though far from being an angel, Gazprom is not necessarily a demon either. It is easy to point fingers and to forget that oil & gas is a merciless sector where every major is trying to position itself for the next 20 to 30 years and secure predictable supply and demand at home and abroad. After all, large Western energy companies were not born nice and proper. It took decades for codes of conduct, tacit or written, to be adopted and enforced. It is also easy to forget that all energy companies have in mind the interests of the country they come from.

Why would it be any different for Gazprom? And why should Gazprom take upon itself to act differently if it can get away with what it does and not be sanctioned by its own government?

The main issue with Gazprom could be summarized by using the famous quote of U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld who said about Iraq "there are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. These are things we do not know we don't know." Because of all the things we do not know about Gazprom, sensitivity to what Gazprom does is greater because ultimately what it decides to do today and how it does it will impact energy supplies for years to come and how the game is played.

The lack of information on the personal relationships between the business and political world, on its exact ownership structure, on the exact identity and role of business intermediaries, on the flow of money through a labyrinthine network of offshore and shell companies, and on the overall exact modus operandi of Gazprom is what leads Gazprom to be subject to greater scrutiny and interrogations. It efforts to maintain an export monopoly for gas flowing to Europe and Asia at a huge cost, possibly over-committing dwindling resources at a time of lower energy prices and lower needs from consumers is another concern as would happen if Gazprom was to fail?

Inside Beltwayistan, a number of Bushevik oil patch zombies still roam the recession-blasted landscape mindlessly chanting their Caspian mantra, "Happiness is multiple pipelines" - with the caveat that they flow westwards and bypass both Russia and Iran. They've now added a new word to their vocabulary, "Nabucco," and worse, have bitten a number of Obama administration officials and visiting European politicians, who have joined their shuffling ranks.

Their thinking remains somewhat clouded by primordial memories of Bush's "fuzzy math," as the statistics about Nabucco are contradictory, to say the least. State Oil Company of the Azerbaijani Republic (SOCAR) vice president Elshad Nasirov is now threatening to start selling Azerbaijan's natural gas, currently Nabucco's sole projected provider of throughput, to Asian countries if Europe further postpones Nabucco's construction.

Construction of the 56-inch, 2,050-mile pipeline, first proposed in 2002, is tentatively slated to begin next year and scheduled for completion by 2014. At a cost initially estimated at $11.4 billion and rising, Nabucco will be the most expensive pipeline ever built, more than three times the cost of the 1,092-mile Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) oil pipeline. Raising such a significant sum in a time of global recession would be an article of faith at best.

Even assuming that Nabucco's boosters manage to assemble a coterie of deep-pocketed suckers - er, investors, the only promised current volume for Nabucco's proposed 31 billion cubic meters (bcm) annual throughput is Azerbaijan's future offshore Caspian Shah Deniz production, estimated at 8 bcm. Even if Shah Deniz does end up supplying Nabucco, its currently promised throughput leaves a deficit of 23 bcm, leading to the question of exactly whose natural gas will Nabucco carry if SOCAR drops out, a worst case scenario requiring the Nabucco consortium to scrounge not 23 bcm, but all 31 bcm per annum, especially as Washington's geopolitics invalidate the participation of either Russia or Iran?

For those with knowledge of energy history in the post-Soviet space, the 419-mile, $500 million Odessa-Brody oil pipeline, completed in 2001, provides a cautionary tale to building pipelines without throughput guarantees. The Ukrainian government rashly built the self-financed line without foreign investment, stretching from its Black Sea port to the Polish border to provide Central Europe with oil despite not having firm commitments from a single oil producing nation for export throughputs. After the pipeline remained unused for three years, a reluctant Kiev was forced in 2004 to agree to transport Russian oil southwards in the opposite direction, for export from Odessa rather than northwards to Central European markets as originally envisaged.

Further complicating the picture are the differing proposed transit and pricing policies of the countries that Nabucco will pass through. The biggest geographical hurdle impacting the bottom line is the fact that, if as some Nabucco boosters aver, Turkmenistan can be persuaded to contribute natural gas, the seabed of the Caspian has yet to definitively be delineated amongst the sea's five riparian states. The question remains unresolved 18 years after the implosion of the USSR dashed the 1920 and 1941 Soviet-Iranian bilateral treaties covering the issue of offshore waters. Building a pipeline across seabed whose ownership is in dispute will enrich maritime lawyers, but few others.

The issue of competing claims over Caspian national waters and seabed is hardly a pedantic exercise. In July 2001 Iran dispatched military aircraft and a warship to intimidate two Azerbaijani survey vessels contracted by BP to leave the Alov-Araz-Sharg field, a site that Azerbaijan claimed was well within its national sector, but disputed by Iran. It seems unlikely Russia and Iran would stand idly by as trans-Caspian sub-sea pipelines, which exclude them, are constructed.

It is often assumed that what preoccupies military planners is their attempts to define the shape of future warfare so that they can adequately prepare equipment and doctrine ideal to meet the threat. Evidence, however, shows that what most occupies their attention is how to adapt existing force structures and systems to react to emerging conditions.

The vast bulk of their attention, inevitably, is on the massive capital investment in weapons systems which last, often, a half-century -- longer than the span of most political eras -- and force structures and doctrine which have accumulated over decades, or longer. There is little scope for innovative, clean-sheet thinking, and even when that occurs, there is little ability to bend the vast bulk of the military and national machinery to the emerging requirements.

Anyway, absent a firm and demonstrable capability change from a threat area, any planning for change, unless it is with offensive weapons, is based on supposition and guesswork. Inevitably, then, change occurs almost entirely as reaction.

The International Strategic Studies Association (ISSA), undertook studies in recent years into how US forces failed to adequately anticipate, and even to react to, emerging patterns of warfare against them by irregular forces in Iraq. The use by these forces of improvised explosive devices (IEDs), and later guerilla rocket attacks, should have been anticipated from warfare patterns in Chechnya and in the Arab-Israeli wars, but the US was unwilling to learn lessons from these theaters for a variety of cultural reasons.

The result of these unexpected opposing tactical methodologies by Iraqi (and later, Afghan Talibani) irregular forces, was to be of strategic importance. US military planners initially responded to the threat -- which they had not fully anticipated -- by up-armoring light vehicles. The result was that the full, two stages of blast were not addressed. Slam-down (ie: the second stage of a blast event) caused a significant proportion of the deaths, even though up-armoring the vehicles had protected occupants from some of the first-stage blast. But the severity of injuries of those who survived slam-down was unprecedented in terms of numbers and outcome, and the cost of injuries to taxpayers was even more than the cost of deaths.

Worse, mission success was minimized, and the political cost of the deaths, injuries, and slow mission achievement caused US voters to oppose the war. The Coalition's adversaries merely needed to wait for political pressures at home to undermine the entire war effort. Thus did the outcomes of poor tactical reaction, and lack of vision, have strategic consequences. US approaches to mine-protected vehicles, despite their failure, began to dominate international thinking. Failure on a grand scale became the model for modern militaries.

The ISSA research, however, began to seep through the US Congress, which began putting pressure on the US Defense Dept., and some changes gradually began to occur. Energy-absorbing (EA) seating and restraint systems began to find their way into US vehicles, but even so, the up-armoring of those vehicles still caused a massive distortion of their intended capabilities. Mission success continued to play a poor second priority to personnel survivability, and even that "priority" was poorly addressed.