The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the Modern World Read online

  Still, the days of Saddam’s capacity to try to control world oil had passed. His continuing impact on oil came mainly in the form of his ability to manipulate prices at the margins. In the first few years after the Gulf War, with exports not permitted, petroleum output fell precipitously. In 1995 the United Nations established the Oil-for-Food Programme, which allowed Iraq to sell a defined amount of oil. Half of the revenues went for essentials, like medicine and food. Before Saddam seized power, Iraq had been an exporter of food to Europe and even shipped dates to the United States. But, under Saddam, agriculture had suffered, and oil exports provided the funding to import the food the country now required. The other half went to reparations and to fund the U.N. inspections. Thereafter Iraqi production recovered to something over two million barrels per day, with significant output smuggled into Jordan, Syria, and Iran. In addition, Saddam’s regime benefitted from billions of dollars of secret kickbacks from those who had been granted contracts to sell Iraqi oil, ranging from mysterious Russian middlemen to a Texas oil tycoon to officials from countries seen as friendly to Iraq.5

  But the program always seemed at risk. Would Saddam continue to cooperate with the U.N. program this time? Or would he break off cooperation, reducing or cutting off altogether Iraqi exports—thus abruptly sending the price up? The uncertainty created considerable price volatility.

  By the end of the 1990s, the U.S. policy of containment was clearly fraying. Sentiment was growing in the Middle East and Europe that the sanctions were hurting not Saddam and his clique, and the Republican Guard that kept them in power, but the general Iraqi population. In 1998 Saddam permanently expelled the U.N. weapons inspectors. A 1998 U.S. National Intelligence Estimate concluded that Saddam’s ambitions for weapons of mass destruction were unchecked.6

  Yet Saddam had been contained, and it appeared that he would never again be able to renew his bid to control the Persian Gulf. Next door in Iran, in 1997, Mohammad Khatami, regarded as a reformer and a relative moderate, was elected president, and there seemed a possibility to reduce the mutual hostility that had so dominated relations between Washington and Tehran. With all these changes, Middle East petroleum now appeared much more secure—and that meant that the world’s oil supply was more secure. Given this stability, it was thought that the price would circle around $20 or so a barrel. For American motorists, that meant relatively low gasoline prices, which they assumed were part of the natural order.

  NEW HORIZONS AND THE “QUIET REVOLUTION”

  At the same time, technology was increasing the security of oil supplies in a different way—by expanding the range of the drill bit and increasing recoverable reserves. The petroleum industry was going through a period of innovation, capitalizing on the advances in communications, computers, and information technology to find resources and develop them, whether on land or farther and farther out into the sea.

  So often, over the history of the oil industry, it is said that technology has gone about as far as it can and that the “end of the road” for the oil industry is in sight. And then, new innovations dramatically expand capabilities. This pattern would be repeated again and again.

  The rapid advances in microprocessing made possible the analysis of vastly more data, enabling geophysicists to greatly improve their interpretation of underground structures and thus improve exploration success. Enhanced computing power meant that the seismic mapping of the underground structures—the strata, the faults, the cap rocks, the traps—could now be done in three dimensions, rather than two. This 3-D seismic mapping, though far from infallible, enabled explorationists to much improve their understanding of the geology deep underground.

  The second advance was the advent of horizontal drilling. Instead of the traditional vertical well that went straight down, wells could now be drilled vertically for the first few thousand feet and then driven at an angle or even sideways with drilling progress tightly controlled and measured every few feet with very sophisticated tools. This meant that much more of the reservoir could be accessed, thus increasing production.

  The third breakthrough was the development of software and computer visualization that was becoming standard throughout the construction and engineering industries. Applied to the oil industry, this CAD/CAM (computer-aided design, computer-aided manufacturing) technology enabled a billiondollar offshore production platform to be designed down to the tiniest detail on a computer screen, and its resilience and efficiency tested in multiple ways, even before welding began on the first piece of steel.

  As the 1990s progressed, the spread of information and communications technology and the extraordinary fall in communication costs meant that geoscientists could work as virtual teams in different parts of the world. Experience and learning from a field in one part of the world could instantly be shared with those trying to solve similar problems in analogous fields in other parts of the world. As a result, the CEO of one company said at the time with only some exaggeration, scientists and engineers “would go up the learning curve only once.”

  These and other technological advances meant that companies could do things that had only recently been unattainable—whether in terms of identifying new prospects, tackling fields that could not be developed before, taking on much more complex projects, recovering more oil, or opening up entirely new production provinces.

  Altogether, technology widened the horizons of world oil, bringing on large amounts of new supplies that supported economic growth and expanded mobility around the world. Billions of barrels of oil that could not have been accessed or produced a decade earlier were now within reach. All that proved to be “just in time” technological progress. For the world appeared to be on a fast track in terms of economic growth—and, thus, in its need for more oil.

  The world was also changing fast in terms of geopolitics. Countries that had been closed or restrictive toward investment by international companies were now opening up, inviting the companies to bring their skills and technology along with their money. The seemingly immutable structure of global confrontation had suddenly buckled.

  In particular, changes were unfolding in the successor states to the Soviet Union—Russia and the newly independent countries around the Caspian Sea—that would integrate the region with global markets. It was as if the twentieth century’s end was being reconnected back to the century’s beginning. The effect would be to broaden the foundations of the world petroleum supply. As an article in Foreign Affairs put it in 1993, “Oil is truly a global business for the first time since the barricades went up with the Bolshevik Revolution.”7

  This observation had particular significance for Russia, the country that had been home of the Bolshevik Revolution, and that now rivaled Saudi Arabia in its capacity to produce oil.

  PART ONE

  The New World of Oil

  1

  RUSSIA RETURNS

  On the night of December 25, 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev went on national television to make a startling announcement—one that would have been almost unimaginable even a year or two earlier: “I hereby discontinue my activities at the post of the President of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” And, he added, the Soviet Union would shortly cease to exist.

  “We have a lot of everything—land, oil and gas and other natural resources—and there was talent and intellect in abundance,” he continued. “However, we were living much worse than people in the industrialized countries were living and we were increasingly lagging behind them.” He had tried to implement reforms but he had run out of time. A few months earlier, diehard communists had tried to stage a coup but failed. The coup had, however, set in motion the final disintegration. “The old system fell apart even before the new system began to work,” he said.

  “Of course,” he added, “there were mistakes made that could have been avoided, and many of the things that we did could have been done better.” But he would not give up hope. “Some day our common efforts will bear fruit and our nations
will live in a prosperous, democratic society.” He concluded simply, “I wish everyone all the best.”1

  With that, he faded out into the ether and uncertainty of the night.

  His whole speech had taken just twelve minutes. That was it. After seven decades, communism was finished in the land in which it had been born.

  Six days later, on December 31, the USSR, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, formally ceased to exist. Mikhail Gorbachev, the last president of the Soviet Union, handed over the “football”—the suitcase with the codes to activate the Soviet nuclear arsenal—to Boris Yeltsin, the first president of the Russian Federation. There were no ringing of bells, no honking of horns, to mark this great transition. Just a stunned and muted—and disbelieving—response. The Soviet Union, a global superpower, was gone. The successors would be fifteen states, ranging in size from the huge Russian Federation to tiny Estonia. Russia was, by far, the first among equals: it was the legatee of the old Soviet Union; it inherited not only the nuclear codes, but the ministries and the debts of the USSR. What had been the closed Soviet Union was now, to one degree or another, open to the world. That, among other things, would redraw the map of world oil.

  Among the tens of millions who had watched Gorbachev’s television farewell on December 25 was Valery Graifer. To Graifer, the collapse of the Soviet Union was nothing less than “a catastrophe, a real catastrophe.” For half a decade, he had been at the very center of the Soviet oil and gas industry. He had led the giant West Siberia operation, the last great industrial achievement of the Soviet system. Graifer had been sent there in the mid-1980s, when production had begun faltering, to restore output and push it higher. Under him, West Siberia had reached 8 million barrels per day—almost rivaling Saudi Arabia’s total output. The scale of the enterprise was enormous: some 450,000 people ultimately reported up to him. And yet West Siberia was part of an even bigger Soviet industry. “It was one big oil family throughout all the republics of the Soviet Union,” he later said. “If anyone had told me that this family was about to collapse, I would have laughed.” But the shock of the collapse wore off, and within a year he had launched a technology company to serve whatever would be the new oil industry of independent Russia. “We had a tough time,” he said. “But I saw that life goes on.”2

  “THINGS ARE BAD WITH BREAD”

  One of the lasting ironies of the Soviet Union was that while the communist system was almost synonymous with force-paced industrialization, its economy in its final decades was so heavily dependent on vast natural resources—oil and gas in particular.

  The economic system that Joseph Stalin had imposed on the Soviet Union was grounded in central planning, five-year plans, and self-sufficiency—what Stalin called, “socialism in one country.” The USSR was largely shut off from the world economy. It was only in the 1960s that the Soviet Union reemerged on the world market as a significant exporter of oil and then, in the 1970s, of natural gas. “Crude oil along with other natural resources were,” as one Russian oil leader later said, “nearly the single existing link of the Soviet Union to the world” for “earning the hard currency so desperately needed by this largely isolated country.”3

  By the end of the 1960s, the Soviet economy was showing signs of decay and incapacity to maintain economic growth. But, as a significant oil exporter, it received a huge windfall from the 1973 October War and the Arab oil embargo: the quadrupling of oil prices. The economy further benefitted in the early 1980s when oil prices doubled in response to the Iranian Revolution. This surge in oil revenues helped keep the enfeebled Soviet economy going for another decade, enabling the country to finance its superpower military status and meet other urgent needs.

  At the top of the list of these needs were the food imports required, because of its endemic agricultural crisis, in order to avert acute shortages, even famine, and social instability. Sometimes the threat of food shortages was so imminent that Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin would call the head of oil and gas production and tell him, “Things are bad with bread. Give me three million tons [of oil] over the plan.”

  Economist Yegor Gaidar, acting Russian prime minister in 1992, summed up the impact of these oil price increases: “The hard currency from oil exports stopped the growing food supply crisis, increased the import of equipment and consumer goods, ensured a financial basis for the arms race and the achievement of nuclear parity with the United States and permitted the realization of such risky foreign policy actions as the war in Afghanistan.”4

  The increase in prices also allowed the Soviet Union to go on without reforming its economy or altering its foreign policy. Trapped by its own inertia the Soviet leadership failed to give serious consideration to the thought that oil prices might fall someday, let alone prepare for such an eventuality.

  “DEAR JOHN—HELP!”

  Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in 1985 determined to modernize both the economy and the political system without overturning either. “We knew what kind of country we had,” he would say. “It was the most militarized, the most centralized, the most rigidly disciplined; it was stuffed with nuclear weapons and other weapons.”

  An issue that infuriated him when he came into office—women’s pantyhose—symbolized to him what was so wrong. “We were planning to create a commission headed by the secretary of the Central Committee . . . to solve the problem of women’s pantyhose,” he said. “Imagine a country that flies into space, launches Sputniks, creates such a defense system, and it can’t resolve the problem of women’s pantyhose. There’s no toothpaste, no soap powder, not the basic necessities of life. It was incredible and humiliating to work in such a government.”

  But Gorbachev had very bad luck in timing. In 1986, one year after his ascension, oversupply and reduced demand on the world petroleum market triggered a huge collapse in the oil price. This drastically reduced the hard currency earnings that the country needed to pay for imports.

  Even though the Soviet oil industry—which was now centered in West Siberia—continued to push up output, it was not enough to bail out the sinking economy. At the same time, Gorbachev was relaxing the grasp of communist repression on the society.5

  While the collapse in oil prices was the “final blow,” as Yegor Gaidar has written, the failure was of the system itself. “The collapse of the Soviet system,” he said, “had been preordained by the fundamental characteristics of the Soviet economic and political system,” which “did not permit the country to adapt to the challenges of world development in the late twentieth century. “High oil prices was not a dependable foundation for preserving the last empire.”

  By the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s, the word “crisis” in government and party documents was being replaced by “acute crisis,” and then by “catastrophe.” Food shortages were severe. At one point, the city of St. Petersburg nearly ran out of dairy products for children.

  In November 1991, Gorbachev asked one of his aides to send British prime minister John Major, at that time head of the G7 group of industrial nations, a three-word message—“Dear John, Help!”6

  It was just a month later that Gorbachev went on television to announce the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

  A NEW RUSSIA : “NO ONE’S AT THE CONTROLS”

  From January 1, 1992, Russia was an independent state, a huge one, traversing eleven time zones. The centrally planned socialist economy of the Soviet Union, where virtually every action in the entire economy was the result of bureaucratic decisions, had disintegrated, leaving economic chaos and uncertainty. There was no rule of commercial law, no basis for contracts, no established channels or rules for trade. Barter became the order of the day, not just for newly emerging traders and merchants out on the streets or working out of their apartments, but also factories, which traded goods and output back and forth as though it were all currency. It was also a free-for-all, a mad scramble, as most of the commercial assets of the state and of the narod—the Soviet people—were now up in play
. It was a frightening time for the populace and a time of great hardship: their pensions and salaries, if paid at all, lost their value; and the low, but guaranteed, level of economic security on which they counted was disappearing before their eyes.

  It was also frightening for the young reformers who came to power under Russian president Boris Yeltsin. “A nuclear superpower was in anarchy,” said Gaidar, who was Yeltsin’s first finance minister. “We had no money, no gold, and no grain to last through the next harvest, and there was no way to generate a solution. It was like travelling in a jet and you go into the cockpit and you discover that there’s no one at the controls.” The reformers couldn’t even get into government computers because the passwords had been lost during the collapse.

  There were two urgent needs in those days. One was to stabilize the economy, renew the flow of goods and services, keep people fed and warm, and establish foundations for trade and a market economy. The other was to figure out what to do with all the factories and enterprises and resources—the means of production that the government owned—and somehow move them into some other form of ownership—private ownership, which was more productive and appropriate to a market economy. Since the state owned most everything, it meant that all the assets of the Soviet Union were up for grabs.