Turkish straits focus of oil
tangle
Some critics say officials have tightened controls on tankers to
set the stage for use of a pipeline
By Catherine Collins
Special to the Tribune
March 9, 2004
ISTANBUL -- The world's oil markets
changed after Sept. 11, 2001. The United States and Europe have
increased their use of Russian and Caspian region oil to reduce
their dependence on the volatile Middle East.
The strategy has put Turkey--and its
Bosporus and Dardanelles straits--at the crossroads of the
international oil trade and renewed a longstanding conflict over
control of the waterways linking the Black Sea with the
Mediterranean and Western Europe.
As Russian and Caspian oil output rose
with demand, so did traffic on the two straits. The increase raised
safety concerns among Turkish authorities, particularly on the
Bosporus, which divides this city of 15 million.
`High risk' alleys
"The straits are under the high risk
of catastrophic accident, which is potentially just one explosion
away," said Capt. Cahit Istikbal, a ship pilot, at a recent meeting
of the International Maritime Association.
The Turks have responded to the
increased traffic by tightly enforcing safety regulations. When
traffic is heavy, ships sometimes wait several days for passage.
Freak snowstorms this winter added to the slowdown, stranding huge
oil tankers and dozens of smaller vessels at sea until the straits
were deemed safe.
Shipping delays have contributed to
the worst shortage of crude oil at European refineries since the
1991 Persian Gulf war and have led to a cascade of complaints.
European diplomats and oil company
executives accused Turkey of slowing the shipping traffic to promote
an alternative to sea transport: the American-backed pipeline under
construction from Baku, Azerbaijan, to Turkey's port of Ceyhan on
the Mediterranean coast.
There is no doubt that Turkey will
gain political and financial benefits from the pipeline, but
officials say their main concern is protecting the increasingly busy
Bosporus and Dardanelles.
The Turks defended the decisions to
close the Bosporus and Dardanelles, also known as the Canakkale
Strait, to commercial traffic three times in January and February
because of the weather.
"The decision to close the straits is
not an arbitrary one," said Baris Tozar, director of the Turkish
government's coastal safety office. "The straits are Turkey's
territorial water, which is open to international traffic. We have
an obligation to protect our city and our environment."
Alexander Fedotov, a top Russian
diplomat in Istanbul, suggested that the Turks were using safety as
an excuse for moves rooted in politics and economics.
"The Turkish concerns are greatly
exaggerated," he said.
S.M. Vainshtok, the president of
Russia's oil pipeline monopoly Transneft, recently criticized Turkey
for delaying oil tankers. On the company's Web site, he said it was
considering building a new pipeline to reduce the amount of oil
shipped by sea from Novorossisk, Russia's port on the Black Sea.
For Russia, the transit route through
the Turkish straits is a key gateway to its biggest oil customers in
Europe. The number of tankers carrying crude oil from Russia and the
Caspian Sea through Turkey's waterways more than doubled in the past
decade. Last year, 135 million tons of oil passed through the
straits.
The Russians and other shipping
countries have long demanded free access through the straits within
the restrictions of the Montreux Convention of 1936. The Turks have
countered that when the agreement was signed, only 20 vessels came
through the straits each day. Turkey has the legal authority to
regulate traffic for safety, they say.
50,000 ships yearly
On the Bosporus, 50,000 commercial
ships compete each year for space with hundreds of daily passenger
ferries, fishing boats and pleasure craft.
Turkish maritime regulators recently
stopped allowing ships longer than 600 feet to pass through the
Bosporus at night.
"If there were a severe accident, it
would close the straits for months," said Tozar, the safety director.
"The countries bordering the Black Sea would lose their only
maritime connection. They should support these regulations for their
own good."
Navigation experts say the problem is
at its worst in the Bosporus, which runs a twisted 19-mile course,
with 12 hairpin turns. Currents move as fast as 8 m.p.h., so vessels
must maintain a speed of 15 m.p.h. to maneuver. At its narrowest
point, the waterway is about a half-mile wide.
The passage is trickier still because
two currents run simultaneously in opposite directions because of
the difference in salination and elevation in the Black Sea at the
northern end and the Marmara on the south.
Guiding a massive oil tanker through
the Bosporus is like "trying to roller-skate on ice," said Istikbal,
who pilots ships along the route regularly.
To deal with these challenges, Turkey
recently built a $45 million radar-controlled Vessel Traffic and
Management System similar to an airport traffic control center.
Operators monitor ships from the computer terminals and closed-circuit
television at the center on the European side of the Bosporus.
During one recent storm, the screens
showed both straits empty. But farther north on the Black Sea, the
controllers could see a traffic jam of tankers and cargo ships. At
one point, 23 tankers and dozens of smaller ships were weathering
waves cresting at 20 feet, resulting in accidents in which 21
sailors were lost at sea.
"Ships that big can't drop anchor and
wait, so they have to keep their engines going and keep moving,"
Tozar said. "We had to arrange them and make sure they didn't come
too close to each other."
Emergency measure
Eventually, there were so many vessels
tossed on the seas that the Turkish coast guard decided to break its
own rules; 46 smaller ships were permitted to enter the strait
because of fears they would break up or run aground in the buffeting.
Istanbul is a unique case for maritime
shipping, said Bayram Ozturk, director of the Turkish Maritime
Research Foundation.
"Imagine Paris or Amsterdam or
some small channel somewhere else through a major city allowing this
level of risk," he said.
Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune
