WWS 401c: The Problem of Caspian Energy

Professor Harold A. Feiveson

ENVIRONMENTAL CONSTRAINTS ON DEVELOPMENT OF

CASPIAN OIL AND GAS RESOURCES:

The Bosporus and the Caspian Sea

Emily J. Hicks

January 4, 1999

Executive Summary

Regarding oil and gas resources in the Caspian Sea, Keith Weissman of the American-Israeli Public Affairs Committee believes that "the environmental questions are the most real thing that people are dealing with here." In the backdrop of all of the geopolitical uncertainties surrounding central Asia’s oil and gas resources sit the Black Sea, the Caspian Sea, and the environmental challenges that will be waiting as oil begins to flow.

One question of increasing political significance that Turkey has been pushing to the forefront internationally is that of increasing oil tanker traffic through the Bosporus Strait, a nineteen-mile long channel that cuts through the heart of Istanbul, connecting the Black Sea with the Mediterranean. More like a sinuous river than an international waterway, the Bosporus in places is less than 700 meters wide and has numerous blind turns.

The 1936 Montreaux Treaty guarantees international freedom of passage through the straits during peacetime, and approximately 4,500 oil tankers a year transport up to thirty-two million tons of oil via the Bosporus. Overall traffic in the straits is three times greater than in the Suez Canal. Increasing congestion has led to 167 major accidents in the past ten years.

Recognizing the particular threat posed by tanker traffic, Turkey in 1994 and again this year moved to impose safety regulations on traffic through the straits. The International Maritime Organization (IMO) has approved many of these regulations, such as the temporary closing of the straits to other traffic when tankers of 100,000 tons or greater pass through, but other regulations, such as limiting maximum tanker size, have not been approved. It is unclear whether the IMO will allow Turkey to take a stricter regulatory position as oil tanker traffic increases.

New oil exports shipped from Black Sea ports will certainly add to the current Bosporus threat. Each 10 million ton increment of Caspian oil shipped out to the Mediterranean will require eight hundred trips through the Bosporus by medium-sized oil tankers or two hundred trips by large tankers. As a result, overland pipeline bypasses have been discussed that would receive oil from tankers within the Black Sea and carry it from Turkish ports on the Black Sea to Ceyhan on the Mediterranean, through Turkish Thrace to the Aegean Sea, or from Bulgaria to Alexandroupolis, Greece. However, the price of such an effort may remain a limiting factor.

Environmental hazards also exist in the Caspian Sea. The inexplicable rise and fall of the water level may create difficulties with using existing port and pipeline infrastructure and may prove a hazard to navigation by large vessels. Also, pollution and increased traffic from oil and gas extraction are likely to threaten already-depleted stocks of sturgeon, the source of the Caspian Sea’s other "black gold," caviar.

Introduction

The environmental concerns surrounding the removal of oil and natural gas resources from the Caspian Sea have been called "the most real thing that people are dealing with [in this area of the world]." While uncertainties abound about the political stability of certain regions or the actual size of the resource base that can be extracted and the costs of doing so, it is certain that both the Bosporus region of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea are facing extreme environmental challenges. As the extraction of oil and gas resources begins, these two regions must start to deal with the pollution and the environmental hazards of increased oil development and traffic.

Part I: THE BOSPORUS

OVERVIEW OF THE BOSPORUS

Threading the Needle through the Heart of Istanbul

The Bosporus Strait is a thirty-one kilometer- (nineteen mile-) long channel that connects the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea via the Sea of Marmara and the Dardanelles. Not only do the Turkish Straits (which include the Bosporus and the Dardanelles) divide Europe and Asia (Appendix: Map 1), but also the Bosporus flows right through the middle of Istanbul, a city of twelve million people (Appendix: Map 2). The Bosporus Strait also offers the sole biological corridor for marine wildlife migrating into and out of the Black Sea, although due to increasing levels of pollution, the last regular migrations occurred more than a decade ago.

Ship pilots have long recognized the Bosporus to be one of the world’s most treacherous international waterways, as in parts it seems more like a narrow river than a major traffic conduit. The sinuous channel has twelve abrupt wide-angle turns. Ships must also navigate through four completely blind acute turns, two of which occur during a two-kilometer stricture near Kandilli in which the channel is fewer than seven hundred meters wide (Appendix: Map 3). Fierce currents of up to eight knots and unpredictable countercurrents can drag ships off course.

Current Traffic Load

The Turkish Straits offer the only access for oceangoing traffic coming from the rest of the world into the Black Sea ports of Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Russia, Georgia, and Turkey. 45,000 vessels transit the Straits each year, which assuming a constant flow equals one ship every twelve minutes. With an average of 136 ships per day carrying a variety of cargoes in 1997, the Bosporus is three times busier than the Suez Canal. In addition, one thousand local vessels also traverse the area on a daily basis.

Not only has the sheer number of vessels in the Straits been rising, but the overall tonnage of the ships has increased as well. Ships that used the Bosporus in 1996 were on average 400% larger than those in 1960. Twenty-five to thirty percent of this traffic consists of oil shipments of approximately 32 million tons per year. Other hazardous materials, including gas, chemicals, and nuclear wastes, are also shipped through the Turkish Straits.

Accidents in the Bosporus

The Bosporus has a long history of narrow escapes and actual collisions between vessels in the strait, events that are only increasing in frequency and severity as oil tanker traffic becomes more common. An average of eleven accidents between a variety of types of vessels occurred each year between 1952 and 1992. However, over the last four years of that period, there was a total of one hundred and fifty-five collisions, or an average of almost forty collisions a year. The number of related casualties has also increased steadily, from seven deaths in 1988 to thirty-seven four years later.

Serious accidents have taken place all along the nineteen-mile stretch, but as yet, Turkey has been simply lucky that the most severe have occurred near the ends of the Straits, thus reducing the threat to the densely-populated Istanbul coastline. Near the southern end of the Bosporus in 1979, the Romanian tanker Independenta collided explosively with a Greek freighter, shattering windows onshore and spilling more than 93,000 tons of oil and diesel fuel. The slick burned for weeks, finally washing out into the Sea of Marmara, the Dardanelles, and the Aegean Sea.

The most severe oil spill in recent history occurred in 1994, when the Greek Cypriot tanker Nassia, carrying 56,000 tons of crude oil from Russia to Italy, collided with the empty freighter Shipbroker at the Black Sea entrance to the Bosporus. Ironically, the environmental organization Greenpeace just two days earlier had strung a sign from one of the bridges over the Bosporus declaring, "Stop Death Ships Now." Thirty men died and 20,000 tons of crude oil poured into the water, creating a slick that burned for five days and endangered dolphins, local fishing industries, and shellfish beds. From the Aegean Sea entrance of the Dardanelles to the Black Sea exit of the Bosporus, the entire stretch of the Turkish Straits was closed, and over two hundred ships lined up in a traffic backlog at either end.

The overall push by the former Soviet republics and Eastern Bloc countries to develop new industries to aid their economies has put extreme pressure on the Bosporus, not just with regards to oil traffic. In 1991, the Lebanese vessel Rubinion 18 struck one of the bridges crossing the Turkish Straits, sinking with its cargo of 20,000 live sheep to the sea floor. The noxious decomposition that resulted was so strong that no marine wildlife had returned to the area as of 1996.

Picking up Hitchhikers

One less obvious threat that is equally potent in terms of the menace it poses to Black Sea wildlife is the problem of foreign "hitchhiker" species. Ships ballasting their holds have an enormous potential to introduce new organisms into the Black Sea. For example, in the mid-1980s, the Black Sea was invaded by a type of jellyfish (Mnemiopsis leidyi) that lives off the eastern seaboard of the United States. Picked up and transported in the ballast water of a large ship, when introduced to the Black Sea, it quickly decimated the populations of small larvae that provided the diet of many native fish. A lack of natural predators allowed it to surge to a total mass of 900 million tons in the Black Sea alone (or in other words, ten times more than the amount of fish that is harvested annually in the entire world). Although the Mnemiposis population is currently declining, it is likely that such an event will recur as traffic into the Black Sea continues to increase.

REGULATING THE BOSPORUS

Montreux Convention

Turkey’s ability to regulate traffic through the Turkish Straits is controlled by the Montreux Convention, which was signed on July 20, 1936 by Australia, Bulgaria, France, Great Britain, Greece, Japan, Romania, Turkey, the USSR, and Yugoslavia. The Montreux Convention guarantees Turkey’s sovereignty over the Straits, "but states that in peacetime, vessels of any nation carrying any cargo may pass freely without delay or regulation through the Straits." It also dissolved a former International Commission created under the 1923 Lausanne Treaty for controlling the Straits.

Contention between Russia and the Ottoman Empire over passage through the Straits can be traced back as far as the Napoleonic Wars in 1798. As a German ally during World War I, the Ottoman Empire closed the Straits to Russian traffic, eliminating the possibility of a southern supply route and helping to hasten Russia’s military collapse and the subsequent fall of the Romanovs. Signed in 1923, the Lausanne Treaty demilitarized the Turkish Straits, placing them under international control. However, anxious to restore local control over the Straits, both Turkey and Russia strongly supported the Montreux Convention thirteen years later. During World War II, a neutral Turkey initially limited all warship passage through the Straits, a policy that proved particularly taxing on German soldiers in the Caucasus who were in dire need of reinforcement. After Turkey joined the Allies in 1945, British warships stood guard in the Straits. The Montreux Convention continued to play an important role during the Cold War. Its warship tonnage restrictions both hindered the USSR from initially creating a large-scale Black Sea port and helped the Soviet Union by serving as a "fig leaf" to keep United States warships out of the Black Sea.

1994 Regulations

Although the Montreux Convention gives Turkey the right to manage traffic through the Bosporus, its flexibility to do so is severely limited. One of Turkey’s primary concerns is that the Montreux Convention has become an outdated tool, as the conditions in the Straits today are quite different than when it was signed. In 1936, an average of seventeen ships per day, with an average weight of thirteen tons, navigated the Straits. Most of these were grain carriers. By 1995, traffic levels had reached an average of 126 ships per day, with an average weight of over 200,000 tons. Today, an increasing percentage of vessels carry hazardous industrial compounds to and from Black Sea ports.

In May 1994, Turkey moved to assert its interests in the Straits in terms of both safety and environmental hazards by passing the Turkish Regulations for Navigation. The new provisions for traffic in the Turkish Straits included:

1. Vessels longer than 150 meters are advised to take pilot captains and guiding tugs.
2. Automatic pilots for navigation are prohibited.
3. Ships powered by nuclear energy, or carrying nuclear or other hazardous materials must report to the Turkish Environment Ministry for permission.
4. Ship height is limited to 190 feet.
5. New traffic lanes will be set, and new traffic separation schemes (TSS) are implemented.
6. No more than a single vessel carrying materials deemed hazardous will be allowed to pass at the same time.
7. All ships must notify Turkish authorities 24 hours in advance of intention to pass through the Straits.
8. Daylight passage is required for ships longer than 200 meters.
9. Passage requires favorable weather.
10. During passage of vessels longer than 300 meters, the entire waterway will be closed to shipping traffic.
11. During passage of vessels longer than 250 meters, one lane of traffic will be closed.
12. Vessel speed is limited to a maximum of 10 knots.

The Turkish government sought and received approval for many of the regulations from the International Maritime Organization’s Maritime Safety Committee, and the new restrictions became effective as of July 1, 1994. Since their inception, the regulations seem to have reduced the number of accidents in the Turkish Straits but have also undeniably increased delays for passage.

Current and Future Regulations

In late October 1998, the Turkish Minister of Foreign Affairs reaffirmed Turkey’s "right and determination to take all necessary measures to protect" the Straits in a press release that also announced new regulations regarding ship passage. None have yet been enacted but will likely include the ability:

1. to halt traffic when currents are unfavorable,
2. to stop any ship on legal grounds,
3. to require more ships to use local pilots, and
4. to require advanced notice of intent to transit the Straits by a greater percentage of vessels.

In addition, Turkey made it clear that no priority of passage would be given to oil tankers and that meticulous security inspections would be conducted of ships entering at either end of the Straits. The Turkish minister also introduced plans to increase the liability insurance required of tankers to the maximum allowable under the Civil Liability Convention. Currently Turkey is forced to absorb much of the cost of shipping accidents that occur in the Bosporus, as the Montreux Convention clause guaranteeing "free" passage has been interpreted quite literally, with Turkey only allowed to collect tolls equaling its administrative costs.

In regards to other regulations that specifically target vessels carrying oil products, Turkey’s desire to require double hulls on all tankers beginning in 2000 was discussed. It is also likely that Turkey will again move to limit maximum tanker size, a consideration that last time was blocked by the IMO.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL QUESTION

Origins of the Question

Historically in this part of the world, environmental concerns historically have not been placed at an equal level of importance when considering the economic and political ramifications of issues. Partly because of this, and partly because its economic and political priorities do "coincide handily" with routes that avoid placing further strain on the Bosporus, Turkey has received a significant amount of criticism for its actions from other countries in the region. After the 1994 regulations were enacted, Russia charged Turkey with not only violating the Montreux Convention through its unilateral action, but also suggested that Turkey was using environmental issues as a means of taking control of oil flow through the region. In the same year, the Novorossisk Shipping Company claimed that its vessels had been detained a total of 620 hours over a six-month period, at a total cost of one million dollars. Officials in Ankara defended their actions toward the shipping company, claiming the delays were due to both weather and daylight passage requirements.

Russia, whose vessels constitute twenty-five percent of the total traffic through the Bosporus, brought its concerns before the General Secretary of the United Nations, but the only results were slight amendments to the approvals previously granted by the IMO. As is typical of the sort of finger-pointing that seems to accompany the growing environmental consciousness in the region, Turkey highlighted the dire environmental situation plaguing Russia today, claiming that Russia had always placed environmental concerns secondary to its desires for economic development.

Turkey is at the crossroads of a political debate over its desire to have an oil pipeline and a technical question concerning the viability of the Bosporus as a transit route for oil and natural gas. While these concerns may in many ways coincide, there are also independent facts that stand on either side and that, in the case of the Bosporus, must not be ignored.

Analysis of the Impact of Black Sea Routes

Any pipeline route that runs to the Black Sea, including those that end at Supsa and Novorossisk, potentially affects the Turkish Straits. It is important to realize that some of this oil and gas will likely be absorbed by other Black Sea nations, thus contributing to increased tanker density in the Black Sea itself but not in the critical Straits. However, Turkey and Russia currently disagree in their estimations of what proportion of the oil this will be.

Currently, over half of Russia’s oil exports, or thirty to thirty-five million tons, are transited annually through the Turkish Straits. It is estimated that AIOC output may bring an additional thirty-six million tons through the Bosporus annually. In the table below, this output is examined in terms of what it means for the Straits as carried by small, medium, and large tankers, all of which are in use there today. It is important to note that each vessel must transit the Straits twice in order to deliver one full tanker of oil to regions outside the Black Sea, once empty and once full.

Tons of Oil Per Year | Size of Ship (Tonnage) | Number of Tankers Required | Additional Passages through Straits
36 million | 10,000 | 3,600 | 7,200
36 million | 25,000 | 1,460 | 2,920
36 million | 100,000 | 360 | 720

Increasing tanker size to reduce the total number of transits through the Bosporus does not necessarily reduce the strain on the area. First, larger vessels tend to have greater difficulty with the strong and unpredictable currents. (Some vessels over 100,000 tons have even had difficulty with draught.) Secondly, under current regulations, the entire Straits must be closed each time 100,000-ton tankers pass through, as they are longer than the requisite 300 meters. Between 1992 and 1995, only seven such tankers transited the Bosporus. Allowing six to eight hours for each tanker to navigate through the Straits means 4,320 hours (or 180 days) that the Bosporus would be closed each year in order to permit the 720 required transits. As a final consideration, larger tankers by their nature pose a greater threat than small ones, for they simply have more oil content to potentially spill. The port of Novorossisk can handle tankers up to 180,000 tons, although such tankers are not currently in use in the Black Sea.

Possibility of a Bypass

As it has become more evident that at least some portion of oil and gas resources from the Caspian will come out through the Bosporus, the idea of building a line to bypass the Straits has been raised with increasing realism. One option would be to load oil from pipelines at Novorossisk or Supsa onto tankers that would carry it to Samsun or Zonguldak, both Turkish Black Sea ports. Pipelines would then carry the oil overland to the Mediterranean port of Ceyhan. One advantage to this bypass is that it could use a combination of new and existing lines by connecting through the Kirikkale refinery near Ankara. Another bypass option is to unload Black Sea oil into a completely new pipeline running from Turkish Thrace out to the Aegean Sea. Also considered has been a third option, a line to receive oil from Black Sea tankers that would start at Bourgas, Bulgaria, and end at the port of Alexandroupolis, Greece. (Appendix: Map 4)

Two common concerns about bypasses are their economic feasibility and their environmental impact. It has been estimated that a bypass through Turkish Thrace would add fewer than fifty-five cents to each barrel of oil, and it is likely that this amount would actually be much lower because unloading oil at a Mediterranean port would allow use of the largest tankers to carry the oil to market. (Japanese plans have been drawn for tankers up to 800,000 tons; the largest tanker transiting the Bosporus is currently only 100,000 tons.) With the ever-present threat of the closure of the Bosporus by Turkey during wartime, and as safety inspections and accidents continue to create costly traffic jams at either end of the Straits, a bypass pipeline’s offer of constant, uninterrupted oil flow may become economically more attractive. Many remain concerned that increasing the number of times oil is transferred between pipelines and tankers will only augment the spill potential, but an informal analysis by the Baker Institute of similar configurations in the Houston, Texas, area indicates that this is not the case.

Part II: THE CASPIAN SEA

Like its neighbor the Black Sea to the east, the Caspian Sea also stands at a crossroads of economic, political, and environmental interests. The environmental issues in particular are amplified because the landlocked Caspian offers no chance of dilution through mixing with other water sources; water flows into, but not out of, the Caspian Sea. Stretching seven hundred miles top to bottom and one hundred and seventy miles across, the Caspian Sea is approximately the size of California, or more than twice the size of all of the five U.S. Great Lakes combined.

In mid-1998, the five countries that border the Caspian met for the first time to discuss the need to balance natural resource exploitation with the biological sustainability of the region, whose environment is currently considered to be in critical condition. However, as Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Iran, and Azerbaijan continue to struggle over the classification of the Caspian as a sea versus a lake, the absence of distinct national spheres of responsibility for particular areas creates a "commons dilemma." There is no incentive for those who competitively share a resource (in the classic case, grazing rights on the town commons) to individually restrain their use, for any excess resource that one leaves behind will simply be used up by the other individuals. In an ecological sense, the "tragedy of the commons" is that it does not reward self-constraint and instead tends to exacerbate misuse of natural and biological resources.

In the past, the United States has suggested that the littoral states of the Caspian meet to simultaneously consider both the legal status of the Caspian and possible strategies for its preservation and development. Until a determination is made about how the Caspian will be divided, the current arrangements will likely continue to hinder and even discourage significant advances in responsible environmental management. For now, however, Russian industrial waste continues to pour in via the Volga, raw Iranian sewage washes out to sea, and Azerbaijani oil rigs leak directly into the Caspian.

The Mysterious Rise and Fall of the Caspian Sea

From its source in European Russia to where it enters the sea in a one hundred mile-wide web of delta channels, the Volga River supplies eighty percent of the water volume of the Caspian Sea. Once it enters the sea, the only outlet for this water is evaporation. Even in prehistoric times, the size of the Caspian fluctuated widely. During its largest stage, the Caspian probably connected to both the Baltic and the Black Seas, yet when the Caspian was at its smallest, the Volga ran all the way to Baku (now situated midway down the coast) before draining into the sea.

The Caspian reached its lowest point in modern times in the early 1970s after falling twelve feet beginning in the 1920s. In an attempt to reduce evaporation, Soviet engineers blocked off a wide, shallow bay that reached thousands of square miles into the desert of Turkmenistan. In 1977, the water level suddenly began a rise that today puts it back near 1930s levels, having regained almost ten feet. However, even the return of the waters to the Caspian has not been enough to help scientists to pinpoint the cause of its fluctuation in the first place.

As the waters first began to rise, many local people believed that some sort of underground canal connected the Caspian with its neighbor the Aral Sea, whose water level was falling at the time. No scientific evidence could connect the rise of the Caspian with the fall of the Aral Sea; instead, researchers determined that the Aral Sea was falling because both the Amu-Danya and the Sir-Danya rivers had been diverted for agricultural uses.

Weather patterns including atmospheric circulation over the sea and cool, rainy summers over the Volga certainly play a small role in the Caspian’s rise, but it is unclear whether these are capable of causing such large-scale shifts. Other scientists cite increased retention of waters for irrigation and hydroelectric power upstream on the Volga between 1929 and 1945 as one reason for the steady fall of the sea. Conversely, they believe that deforestation around industrial centers along the Volga has decreased the water-holding capacity of the soil, now resulting in increased water flow that then enters the Caspian.

Tectonic shifts in the sea floor have also been blamed for possibly changing the water volume of the Caspian, although no significant seismological events have been recorded. Global warming may also play a part. One factor that contributes significantly, though certainly not exclusively, to the increasing water level is the existing pollution in the Caspian. Leaks from oil fields have created thin films of oil that cover parts of the sea in some areas, thus reducing evaporative water loss.

Former Soviet republics that once considered diverting rivers from Siberia into the Caspian region in order to stop the fall of the Caspian water level now struggle to deal with water that stretches twelve miles inland in places that were dry in recent memory. Forty thousand square kilometers of coastal zone has been flooded altogether. Eight hundred of those are in Azerbaijan, where fifty towns and cities, including Baku, whose port was built during the years when the Caspian was receding, have suffered floods and major damage. In Azerbaijan, two hundred and fifty industrial facilities, eleven miles of railway, and twenty-five thousand acres of farms and grassland can no longer be used because they are covered with some amount of water. In Turkmenbashi, Turkmenistan, loading docks are under water. Thirty Kazakh oil fields sit in the flood zone, and pipelines designed to carry oil overland now sit at the bottom of a corrosively salty inland sea. Total losses in Kazakhstan alone total 8.5 billion tenge, or approximately 112 million American dollars.

The greatest threat to local residents, tourists, offshore workers, and fisheries could come from the flooding of radioactive soils that remain from the time in which Soviet nuclear weapons were tested underground and nuclear explosives were used to carve out the land. In 1997, a group of scholars from the Kyoto Institute of Economic Research at Japan’s Kyoto University began a three-year study of levels of radioactive alpha rays along the northern Caspian border. Other scientists are particularly wary about nuclear contamination in the Aktau region of Kazakhstan, home to a major industrial port. The area contains nuclear reactors as well as a uranium waste dump and refinery that could contaminate the region should the sea continue to rise by as little as one meter.

A one meter rise is the same estimate that many in Baku give for what it would take to flood oil wells, pipelines, and refineries along their coast. Unfortunately, continued flooding appears imminent. Scientists currently forecast that the Caspian Sea will continue to rise another one to one and a half meters until 2020 and will then stabilize over the following forty to fifty years at twenty-six meters below sea level. The threat is made more dire by the desire of many port cities such as Aktau to build breakwaters to hold back the rising sea as part of modernization plans in anticipation of increased tanker traffic. Pushing back the seas in populous industrial areas will only force more water onshore in those that are less populated and less prosperous, such as those contaminated by nuclear wastes.

The Caspian’s Other "Black Gold

"

The diversification of national interests towards the development of oil and gas directly threatens another form of Caspian "black gold," the caviar market. Caviar, the unfertilized eggs of the female sturgeon, sells for up to fifty dollars an ounce on the world markets. Long considered the most prestigious caviar source in the world, the Caspian Sea today supplies more than ninety percent of world consumption. However, the size of its sturgeon population has fluctuated wildly over the past fifty years, a situation that increasing industrial development in the Caspian will likely amplify.

Female sturgeon do not begin to spawn until their mid- to late-teens but then continue to do so throughout their lifetime, which can span more than a century. As a result of the sturgeon’s long delay in reaching sexual maturity, the ramifications of environmental decisions that negatively impact sturgeon populations are not often immediately apparent. In 1959, the damming of the Volga River cut the sturgeon off from its breeding grounds, dramatically reducing the number of new young. Four years later, the Soviet leadership met "to decide whether to give priority to oil extraction or to the development of its sturgeon stocks." The final decision favored the sturgeon, and the Soviet Union subsequently built twelve sturgeon hatcheries around the Caspian. As a result, sturgeon catch successfully rose from 10,000 tons in 1963 to 27,000 tons in 1982. However, continued pollution and the fall in the water level throughout the 1960s and 1970s brought the 1996 catch down to a mere 2500 tons.

Even without the new challenge of increased oil and gas development, it is unlikely that the current sturgeon crisis could be rectified easily. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S.S.R. and Iran, as exclusive custodians of the Caspian, coordinated to strictly control sturgeon fishing. In fact, according to World Wildlife Fund reports, a Soviet minister of fisheries was executed in the 1970s for attempting to smuggle caviar to the West. However, the challenge of coordinating the efforts of five littoral states has proven much more difficult. In Iran, the state-owned Shilat Trading Company issues licenses and sets quotas for Iranian fishermen, then patrols for poachers. The other states have been less aggressive, despite a February 1992 letter of intent by all five littoral states to combine their efforts to prevent the exploitation of marine resources. Currently, brakanieri ("buccaneers" or poachers) bring in an annual catch that equals, if not exceeds, that of legal sturgeon fishermen. In November 1997, five species of sturgeon were added to lists protected under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). Eighteen other fish species that resemble sturgeon were also given CITES protection, a telling indication of the role that poaching has played in driving the population declines. Legal caviar fishermen (who view their industry as something of an art) have long complained that one major problem with poachers is that they simply are not knowledgeable about the various sturgeon species and the preparation of uncontaminated caviar. The brakanieri focus on potential profit, not on the maintenance of the industry, and as a result, everyone connected to the Black Sea suffers. The detrimental effects of concentrating solely on profit provides a lesson that the caviar fishermen may do well to share with their counterparts in the oil and natural gas industries.

Demands on the sturgeon population will only increase as the other natural resources of the Caspian are developed. For example, large shoals of sturgeon spend the winter in shallow, warmer waters over three major Azerbaijan oilfields: the Azeri, the Chirag, and the Guneshli. Hydrocarbon levels in those waters average forty-five to fifty milligrams per liter, a level which, according to the State Ecology Committee, would be acceptable in an open body of water such as the North Sea. However, in closed bodies of water, oil forms a film on top of the water at concentrations as low as fifteen milligrams per liter. Such oil wastes from fields off Azerbaijan block oxygen exchange between the water and the air, causing the sturgeon to suffocate. Similar sturgeon shoals congregate in shallow warm water off the coast of Kazakhstan in an area where drilling on the Caspian Shelf is scheduled to begin soon. One journalist noted during a November 1998 trip to the region, "If modern offshore drilling is anywhere near as dirty as Soviet-era drilling off the coast of Azerbaijan – where the water at Baku is still coated with a rainbow film of petroleum – then the sturgeon is finished."

The Outlook for the Caspian Sea

The key for the protection of existing resources in the Caspian Sea is the coordination of the littoral states, a job which will become more difficult as new outside interests stream into the area. For example, it is likely that increasing industrial traffic in the Caspian may make it more difficult to detect sturgeon poachers. Furthermore, the states must begin to deal with not simply the problems of the present, such as ways to maintain the integrity of their ports in the face of rising waters, but hey must also be proactive towards pressing future problems, such as the threat of nuclear contamination.

Ironically, further impetus for the development of environmentally sound management practices may come from the oil and gas industry itself. Stringent standards currently control offshore drilling in both the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico, in large part because public opinion is more highly tuned and wields greater control in Western countries. According to Senior Advisor Jack Carter, the U.S. Department of Energy has strongly encouraged Caspian countries to require a similarly demanding level of performance from oil and gas companies there. Not only is the U.S. interest in doing so grounded in both technical and environmental safety, but, more selfishly, it levels the regulatory playing field. Otherwise, Carter believes, some companies will come into the Caspian practicing the same high level of performance demanded of them elsewhere, while those with no such background will not, thus allowing less experienced, less safety-conscious companies to outbid their superior competitors.

Part III: CONCLUSION

The economic and political hurdles to oil and gas development in the Caspian Sea are being closely monitored by many, but it is important to realize that significant environmental hurdles exist as well. The challenge to those working in the region is not to crash through the environmental obstacles, knocking them blindly aside, but instead to approach them with a careful eye for solutions that maintain and even rebuild environmental quality in the region. Only then can the leap toward twenty-first century resource development in the region be a graceful one.

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Kao, Tim. "Threats to Oil Pipelines," The San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1998.

Kemp, Geoffrey, Director of Regional Strategic Programs, Nixon Center for Peace and Freedom, interviewed by WWS 401, November 3, 1998.

Morningstar, Richard, Assistant Secretary, Coordinator for Caspian Policy, interviewed by WWS 401, November 2, 1998.

"Conservation of Biological Diversity as a Prerequisite for Sustainable Development in the Black Sea Region." NATO Advanced Research Workshop, October 2, 1996.

"Offshore Pipelines," Offshore, August, 1998.

"Pyrocool FEF," Ozone Depletion Network Online Today, July 13, 1998.

Ibid. March 22, 1998.

Ozyildiz, Inan, First Secretary, Turkish Embassy, interviewed by Emily J. Hicks and Ken Shaitelman, November 3, 1998.

Platt’s Oilgram News, April 18, 1994.

Sciolino, Elaine. "It’s a Sea! It’s a Lake! No. It’s a Pool of Oil!" The New York Times, June 21, 1998.

"The Level of the Caspian Sea," TASS, November 11, 1997.

"New Regulations in the Bosporus," TASS, October 21, 1998.

"Turkish Government Decides to Accede to the Civil Liability Convention (CLC)." Turkish Embassy Press Release, September 10, 1998.

Wade, Anne-Berry. "M2 Presswire," MMS, October 19, 1998.

Weiner, Eric. "NPR Weekend Saturday," National Public Radio News, July 18, 1998.

Weissman, Keith, American-Israeli Political Action Committee, interviewed by WWS 401, November 2, 1998.

"The Mediterranean Route: An Environmental Alternative." Woodhams Associates, 1996.

"Bosporus Strait Reopens to Traffic," The Xinhua News Agency, March 18, 1994.