John Schettler - 9 Days Falling, Volume I

Chevron’s Medusa platform in the North Caspian region was on emergency watch again tonight, as local militants were threatening more attacks on rigs and pipelines to protest the ongoing incursion of corporate interests in the region. The old maxim of the oil industry was again proved brutally true: he who controls the routes of distribution will also control the producers. In Chevron’s case, its production was in a very uncomfortable place as the war drums began to sound, and the routes of distribution were all too fragile. One of the last US producers in the Caspian, it stubbornly clung to its prized Kairyan fields at the southern fringe of the super massive Kashagan Oil & Gas Field Complex, and Medusa was the crown jewel, a platform every bit as big as Thunder Horse had been in the Gulf of Mexico.

Discovered over a decade ago, Kashagan was first thought to yield 13-15 billion barrels of oil, making it second only to Ghawar in Saudi Arabia. Extensive new surveys after 2018 had now discovered the fields there to be much deeper and even more massive than previously thought. Superfield Kashagan was now the dominant player where oil was concerned, promising well upwards of 25 billion barrels of recoverable oil, and much more in reserve. While Ghawar in Saudi Arabia was aging and now needed water and gas infusion to extract its diminishing reserves, Kashagan was a new field in its adolescence, and set to transform the entire North Caspian region onto the most geopolitically strategic zone on earth. Ben Flack was sitting right in the middle of it on Medusa, aptly named, as the pipelines snaked out from the platform in all directions, feeding on the dark oil beneath the sea.

The pipelines were the arteries carrying the life blood of the developed world. They headed east to China, north to Russia, and along the Trans-Caspian Consortium route under the Caspian Sea to Baku before crossing Turkey to Ceyhan on the Eastern Med. What could not be sent by pipeline was also loaded directly onto shallow draft tankers and also moved to Baku, which had once again regained the great strategic prominence that it had in the 1940s when Hitler so coveted the oil there.

“Crap,” Flack said aloud. “Look at this goddamned wire on the Gulf situation. That’s going to make my life miserable. With Thunder Horse down, my ass is in the sling now for production. How am I supposed to move the damn oil with the locals threatening to raise hell out here?”

Here we just get our teeth into this field and the damn Chinese have to go and get a hair up their ass over these damn little islands, he thought. Sure it was for the oil survey rights, but how many barrels could there be? It would be years before they’d pump anything, but this little squabble was going to cause a headache for all the big producers too. Now every goddamned militant group from the Khazars to the PKK thinks they need to get in on the act here. Damn inconvenient to have Russian troops up north where they could swing down and cause some real mischief. If home office thinks a little shortfall of 20,000 barrels per day is a bother now, wait until the Russkies get here.

Chevron tried for a piece of the Caspian reserves in 2007, and failed much farther south. Then the company managed to sign a lucrative development contract in the thick of things up north at Kashagan in 2018. The Company’s slim profit margin was depending on the field’s production, and Ben Flack was the man in the chair when things started to heat up on the global stage. It was just his luck, and he ticked off his production numbers noting that the shortfall was becoming harder and harder to cover.

They were already 20,000 barrels off the pace because of the goddamned bunker busting, he mused. That was a term the locals used to describe their illegal sampling of oil from the ubiquitous pipelines crisscrossing the Caspian basin. Smugglers and militant groups, and even government controlled raiding parties would slip up to a line with a lighter full of empty barrels at sea or a truck with the same on land. Then they’d drill a hole and feed in some plastic tubing to milk the line. Just last week the Caspian District Police had a shootout with oil bandits, killing several militants, but that was old news in the region. As much as 10% of all the oil Chevron and other trans-nationals pulled out of the area ended up getting siphoned off by smugglers, the local mosquitoes sucking at the veins of the oil industry with their damned bunker busting.

So Ben’s numbers were off this month, and he had crews working all the rigs associated with Medusa very hard tonight, in the hopes of making up for some of the enormous losses expected in the Gulf of Mexico with this odd late season hurricane. Pumping light was just not an option for him now. He had mid-level managers on the phone from headquarters in San Ramon, the Bollinger Canyon Boys as he called them, and the pressure was ratcheting up.

With plenty of well pressure from the competition, the Bollinger boys wanted to know why the numbers were down again from the Caspian? Ben Flack hated the thought of another long conversation about the lack of security for ongoing operations, the slow response time of the Kazakh Police in the region, let alone their military.

KAZPOL, the Mobile Police that patrolled the region in shallow drafted boats, was never there when you needed them, and never really reliable when they did manage to arrive on the scene in a timely manner. It was bad for numbers, and numbers were something Ben Flack understood all too well.

He was thankful that the US viewing TV audience had such a short attention span, for it kept the real world news off the radar screen for most Americans. While they were all busy dialed in to singers and chefs and job seekers on the Voice, the Taste, the Job, and dancing with the stars or wondering how they’d fare if they were washed up on some deserted island with a chance for a big payoff if they played the game right, Ben Flack dealt with the real world, the very real and compelling problem that he stared at every night and every morning in his production tables. How to keep those numbers up, nudge them yet higher, and keep the folks all nice and warm back home this winter? That was reality as he knew it, and it made for some particularly uncomfortable nights on his rig, worrying over feeds and flows and well pressure and tanker traffic to the two big terminals on the coast—not to mention the pipelines.

Numbers were numbers, a cold hard reality that could not be remedied by going to a commercial break. He was on his own little island out here in the region, on a hulking metal platform in the middle of a shallow oil drenched sea. While the folks back home watched Survivor , he was the one with his butt in the chair so they could keep their thumbs busy on the remote. But things weren’t so good on his little island tonight. Ben’s numbers were down again, and if the situation got any worse in the next few days, with militants threatening to launch another major protest or two, he just might have to take the precaution of shutting Medusa down. That would take another 100,000 barrels off his production list for each day he was down—bad news for him, if not FOX or CNN. Bad news for the boys back in Bollinger Canyon, and bad news for the folks back home, though they would probably never hear much about it…Until their next trip to a gas station.

The worst of it all was the big shipment scheduled for this very weekend, an old rig from Baku that had been refurbished for operations. It was due to be set up tonight, and Crowley & Company, a highly specialized transport outfit, was already on the scene, moving in equipment they would need for the job. Crowley was able to get the platform all loaded on submersible barges and carefully prepared for the long tow job from Baku. Once on site, they would have no more than 48 hours to remove the sea fastenings and get the equipment shifted to the off shore shallows over the production site. Most of the work was scheduled for tomorrow night, at the dark of the moon. There was no sense inflaming the passions of the locals with a daylight move. Government officials had been paid off, a little KAZPOL security was in place, but with military units on heightened alert these last few weeks Ben was still worried.