BAKU, Azerbaijan — Waiting to clear customs at Baku's international airport, Texas-based courier Frank Woeste cradled a package of oil-drill brake pads and seals he had packed into a battered paper bag and hand-carried 9,500 miles from Houston--the only safe way to get the badly needed parts here quickly.
Welcome to the Caspian Sea, the world's largest landlocked body of water, repository of some of the most plentiful deposits of crude oil and natural gas on Earth. And, for those scrambling to recover those resources, not much else.
Far from the world's new industrial centers, removed from modern trade routes and largely neglected during seven-plus decades of Soviet rule, the newly independent states bordering the Caspian--Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan--pose an unprecedented challenge to the world's major oil companies and a dazzling array of camp followers hoping to ride a trillion-plus wave of petrodollars.
This challenge is complicated by the two other countries bordering the Caspian, Russia and Iran, both former imperial powers in the region and neither especially accommodating to the needs of international oil giants.
How international businesses now flocking into the region meet these difficulties and how the Caspian nations themselves deal with their sudden wealth will do much to determine the longer-term future of countries expected to provide energy to the industrialized world for much of the next century. It is a drama that especially affects Americans as the United States--and other Western nations--develop important new interests in the Caspian region.
Often, the lack of modern equipment in the area, coupled with the absence of any easy way to import it, makes for primitive working conditions.
"We're using old Soviet technology that's in bad condition," said Marko Filipi, a seasoned Croatian wellhead worker employed by the Larmac & Dragon Oil Co. near Cheleken, Turkmenistan. "The platforms are in bad shape--there's lots of leaking. I've never worked in conditions like this before."
Neither has British Petroleum executive Mike Shearman.
At a bustling quayside in Baku's harbor, Shearman pointed to a nearby river barge laden with 800 tons of freshly fabricated steel that he needed as part of a drilling rig refit he was supervising.
The barge had been underway for weeks, he said, slowly working its way southward through Russia's inland waterways from a construction yard on the Russo-Finnish border 1,800 miles northwest. An early Russian winter would have trapped the cargo until spring.
