NEW YORK — When the main pipeline that carries oil through Georgia was completed in 2005, it was hailed as a major success in the U.S. policy to diversify its energy supply. Not only did the pipeline transport oil produced in Central Asia, helping move the West off its dependence on the Middle East, but it also accomplished another American goal: It bypassed Russia.
U.S. policy makers hoped that diverting oil around Russia would keep it from reasserting control over Central Asia and its enormous oil and natural gas reserves, and would provide a safer alternative to Moscow's control over export routes that it had inherited from Soviet days. The tug-of-war with Moscow was the latest version of the Great Game, the 19th-century contest between Imperial Britain and Czarist Russia for dominance in the region. (Asian Energy Comment: A must read is The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives, New York: Basic Books (October 1997), ISBN 0-465-02726-1, by Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzezinski subsequently translated and published in nineteen languages)
A bumper sticker that U.S. diplomats distributed around Central Asia in the 1990s summed up Washington's strategic thinking: "Happiness is multiple pipelines."
Now energy experts say that the hostilities between Russia and Georgia could threaten U.S. plans to gain access to more of Central Asia's energy resources in a year when booming demand in Asia and tight supplies helped push the price of oil to records.
"It is hard to see through the fog of this war another pipeline through Georgia," said Cliff Kupchan, a political risk analyst at Eurasia Group, who was an official at the U.S. State Department during the administration of President Bill Clinton. "Multinationals and Central Asian and Caspian governments may think twice about building new lines through this corridor. It may even call into question the reliability of moving existing volumes through that corridor."
At the very least, they warn, Russia may figure even more prominently in shaping the region's energy future.
The latest struggle over Caspian oil started in the 1990s under Clinton, after the breakup of the Soviet Union. The building of the pipeline that passes through Georgia, the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan line, or BTC, remains one of the signature successes of the U.S. strategy to put a wedge between Russia and the Central Asian countries that had been Soviet republics.
Attempts to get oil out of Kazakhstan through a non-Russia route failed. Most of the oil production from the giant field of Tengiz, for example, in which Chevron is the largest investor, now travels through a pipeline known as the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, which runs along the northern Caspian coastline to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossisk. And proposals for new oil and natural gas pipelines in the region have stalled, in part, because of Moscow's opposition.
Some analysts say they believe that the armed conflict between Russia and Georgia is not only rooted in historical enmity but also is an outgrowth of Russia's fears that Georgia, with its pro-Western bent, could prove to be a lasting competitor for energy exports.
"Russians treasured the fact they had a monopoly on oil and gas pipelines from Central Asia, as it gave them considerable clout," said Marshall Goldman, a senior scholar for Russian studies at Harvard and the recent author of "Petrostate: Putin, Power, and the New Russia."
"By agreeing to having an oil pipeline, Georgia made itself more vulnerable," he said.
A big concern for the future is what will happen to oil from Kashagan, the giant oil field in the Caspian Sea that holds more than 10 billion barrels of reserves. Located off Kazakhstan, Kashagan is the most ambitious attempt to date by Western companies to develop new supplies in the Caspian. It will be at least five years before oil starts flowing from there, but the operating consortium, which includes Exxon Mobil and ConocoPhillips, plans to transport Kashagan's oil through the BTC pipeline. That would involve building a new pipeline under the Caspian, which might run into opposition from Russia.
The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, 1,100 miles, or about 1,800 kilometers, long, transports 850,000 barrels a day of oil, or 1 percent of global supplies, from Azerbaijan through Georgia and Turkey, ending at the port of Ceyhan on the Mediterranean. Much of the oil is bound for Europe and the United States.
The oil comes from several fields in Azerbaijan, offshore in the Caspian. The line, which cost $4 billion to build, also carries some oil from Tengiz that is barged across the Caspian.
Before the BTC pipeline was built, the West struggled to find routes that would avoid what Western leaders considered to be potential trouble spots, but it was difficult. The United States did not want the line to pass through Iran, for instance. In the end, the U.S. government, BP, which operates the pipeline, and other private investors decided the line should proceed on its current route. That gave a boost to newly independent counties and to Turkey, an ally, but it also sent the line through three nations struggling with separatists.
The conflict in Georgia has complicated efforts by BP to find alternative routes for its exports. There have also been unconfirmed reports in recent days that Russian planes had struck at the pipeline, although BP has said the line was not hit. BP said Wednesday that it would take a week to determine how long the pipeline would remain shut.
So far, energy markets have been largely indifferent to events in Georgia.
Russia, which is overflowing with petrodollars because of the rise in the price of oil, has not been afraid to flex its newfound muscle in recent years to bring its neighbors in line.
Two years ago, Gazprom, the national oil company then run by Dmitri Medvedev, now the Russian president, cut off natural gas supplies to Ukraine in the winter because of a price dispute. That had a knock-on effect in Europe, where many policy makers began questioning their reliance on Russian natural gas, although there was no consensus on what to do. One proposal, favored by the United States, has been to build a natural gas pipeline parallel to the BTC line.
"For the Europeans, the Ukraine gas crisis was like a snooze alarm," said Frank Verrastro, the director of the energy and national security program at the Center for International and Strategic Studies, in Washington.
But Verrastro, a former senior executive with Pennzoil, said it would be very hard to build a new Western pipeline like BTC, especially now.
"We got BTC because there was a confluence of commercial and diplomatic interests," he said. "But the United States didn't learn the right lessons. They thought that all you had to do was lean on these countries and a new pipeline would happen. But that was an abject failure."
Verrastro added: "There is a shift happening in the marketplace. We need a Plan B. But we don't have a Plan B."
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