April 6, 2010: Oil Rocks

[xoxoxoBruce]

What could possibly go wrong?

There are a number of massive artificial peninsulas extending offshore from the Azerbaijani city of Baku. The most famous of these is known as Oil Rocks, and it is an offshore metropolis of semi-abandoned oil extraction platforms in the Caspian Sea.

As Wikipedia informs us:
The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some workers' dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex's 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure.
These "new additions... grafted onto the existing structure" are at least partially responsible for the epic nature of the place, as it seems to push ever further outward into the tides and weather.

Funded with private money, and created entirely for the purpose of extracting oil from the Caspian's shallow seabed, these and other peninsular extensions of Baku are functional urbanism at its most giddy: uni-purpose structures like something dreamt up by Guy Maunsell, by way of the obligatory reference to Constant's New Babylon.

Do you think the others on the Caspian, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Iran, are worried about possible environmental damage?

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