Saving Azerbaijan’s damaged ecology
After decades of focusing on the development of the nation’s oil and gas industries, the government has now promised to begin major clean-up operations.

by Charles van der Leeuw

In 1993, when the first report on the state of the environment in Azerbaijan was released, it appeared that 70 percent of the country’s urban population was permanently exposed to serious health threats by pollution.

In 1990, Baku Bay contained 14 times the so-called ‘limit’ of allowed concentration (LAC) of oil-residues and 10 that of phenol. Moreover, the industry was responsible for over two-thirds of the 1.7 million tons of hydrocarbons, 90,000 tons of sulphurdioxide, 75,000 tons of carbon dioxide and thousands of tons of benzapyrene, chlorine, formaldehyde and other pollutants that were being blown into the atmosphere each year.

On the Apsheron peninsula, which juts nearly 40 miles into the Caspian Sea, over 30,000 acres of land were so heavily polluted that parts of its soil have had to be dug out down to sixty feet in order to clean up the mess.

Pollution of the surface soil has had an impact on public health for more than a generation already. Slick tar layers dating from the late 19th and the first half of the 20th century have formed radium, potassium and thorium in time through photosynthesis. Radioactivity of well over 100 times the accepted norm has been spotted in the human food-chain, exposing people to cancer and birth anomalies.

Offshore spills
Off-shore, the situation has become worse. Throughout the development of the nation’s offshore oil industry, and later during the growth of the gas extraction sector, carelessness prevailed because technology was orientated strictly towards performance in terms of output, with environmental concerns given virtually no thought. The result has been a large number of oil spills, the consequences of which impose themselves on the present population as well as on future generations.

An example of such spills was the accident which occurred on 18 August 1983. The oil platform "60 Years Azerbaijan" has started drilling into the sea-bottom at some 14 000 feet, about 250 miles off the Apsheron coast.

After 30 hours of drilling, the drill shaft had exceeded the 1,600 feet depth. It was then that a high-pressure layer of oil sent a hot-glowing gusher soaring 100 feet into the air, shaking the entire platform on its foundations. Finally, on October 10, the platform had to be abandoned for "lack of viability." Soon afterwards, the gusher died out.

On 20 August 1991, as the USSR began to rapidly break apart and Azerbaijan’s own renewed troubles with interethnic struggles began, an attempt was made to revive the still leaking well. This only resulted in another gusher.

Yet this was not the first accident that year. In February, the Shelf-2 rig hit a high-pressure well at 1,300 feet, sending a gusher of red-hot oil, gas, dust and rock soaring 150 feet in the air. The flow was only stopped after many weeks of effort. This, as well as the August spill, only added to the damage inflicted on the flora and fauna of the Caspian Sea and its shore-lands.

Starving the sturgeon
Frequent oil spills on the Caspian Sea are only part of the ecological degradation of the Caspian region. While under Soviet control, Baku's oil industry dumped approximately 30 million cubic feet of oil-based waste into the sea every day.

As a result, oil counted for 16 percent of the substance of the upper layer of Baku Bay’s sediment. Similar effects were the result of intensive dumping of oil-waste in the Northern Caspian, especially in the area near the Mengishlak oil fields, and off Cheleken on the Turkmen coast.

As the largest inland sea in the world, the Caspian has a unique and fragile environment. Whereas the temperature of the upper layer of water, to a depth of one hundred feet, varies greatly between summer and winter, its deeper waters have a constant low temperature.

These two levels of the sea are separated by a crucial ‘jump layer’ where phytoplankton grows. Its volume is sustained by photosynthesis and it feeds on microorganisms present in the deeper waters all year long, and in the upper waters during the winter months. In turn, phytoplankton serves as food for zooplankton, which in turn is consumed as food by the Caspian’s smaller fish.

In turn, seals and seabirds from the shore feed on the these fish.

The Caspian’s lesser sturgeons, known as sevruga and ossetra, feed on micro-organisms, while the larger predatory beluga eat the sea’s smaller fish.

Discharges of oil, "oil-water" and other wastes during the second half of the 20th century have raised temperatures in the Caspian deep-sea water. As a result the all-important jump-layer in these now-too-warm waters has sunk by several yards, thus diminishing the level of photosynthesis and thereby severely disrupted the Caspian Sea’s entire food-chain.

Since the late 1970s, the sturgeon population (90% of the world's sturgeons live in the Caspian) has been reduced to less than half its previous size. And even most of those sturgeon spared by contamination have ended up in the nets of illegal poachers, who accounted for 90 percent of the catch over the last decade. This past summer, Azerbaijan has accepted an international moratorium on sturgeon catch, in a last ditch effort to save the species.

Ever since independence, succeeding governments of Azerbaijan have attempted to catch up with the harsh reality of the country‘s damaged environment. The decline of the national industry has stopped the outflow of heavy metals, mercury and other heavy contaminants to some extent. But funding for a major clean-up operation has never been made available.

As for foreign oil companies, they are now obliged by law to present ecological assessment reports before each drilling operation starts.

While in every such report it is admitted that major spills following drilling accidents do cause severe damage to the marine environment, foreign firms tend to minimize the risk of such spills.

What’s more, some oil companies still dump fluid waste from their appraisal wells into the sea, claiming that the damage inflicted on the environment by doing this is "negligible."

On shore, similar ambiguities persist. Attempts to integrate Baku’s drinking water supplies and sewage system into a water recycling circuit have been halted time and again, due to local authorities’ reluctance to contribute funds to it, or at least give investors the necessary guarantees to support such a project.

In the countryside, onshore oil fields continue to leak crude oil and tar into the environment, and little can be done to stop it.

Meanwhile, used fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides keep accumulating in the surface water; and, in cases where after privatization operations manufacturing plants resume their activity without stopping dumping their waste, authorities have a hard time making such newly-managed firm face the legal consequences.

This past summer, the new minister of ecological affairs, Professor Husseyn Bagirov, dismissed most of the ministry’s old staff for incompetence, and Bagirov is now trying to form a new team whose expertise and zeal should meet the immense target. Only time will tell, however, if Bagirov has arrived in time to save the country’s environment from permanent damage.