Towards a Political Ecology of Oil in Post-communist Georgia: the conflict over the Kulevi Oil Port Development

The establishment of a new oil terminal near Kulevi on the Black Sea coast of Georgia has become a highly controversial mega-project, and this article explores its political and environmental significance in the context of rising global demand for the region's oil and gas reserves. The Kulevi Terminal is intended to be a storage facility and a transfer point for black oil, fuel oil and other oil products delivered from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan, and Kazakhstan, after extraction from the Caspian Sea and Black Sea fields (Skhireli 2003). It will also serve as an outport for Georgian petrochemical production, especially from the Samgori field in the east of the country. Its location is in Khobi region on the mouth of the Khobi River (Figure 1). The capacity of three existing oil terminals in Georgia (in Batumi, Poti, and one recently constructed in Supsa) has proven insufficient to meet both regional and interregional trans-shipment demand for a variety of reasons, not least the rush by Western oil interests to re-articulate the Caspian fields into global energy networks as quickly as possible.2 The throughput capacity of the Kulevi terminal will be around 6 million liquid tonnes which will rise to 10 million tonnes following the planned second stage of construction. This project also includes construction of rail-receiving and loading facilities, an oilstorage facility with its own tank farm, and two 250-meter piers, with associated pipelines and pumping stations. Further, there will be 19 storage tanks with a total capacity of 380,000 cubic metres (Krebs & Joosten 2006) thus drastically exceeding the capacity of Supsa Oil Terminal (40,000 cubic metres) (Gegeshidze et al. 2002). Each tank is serviced by a railway that will transport up to 10 million tons of oil during the first operation year (IA Prime-News 2004b) with a final planned capacity of 35 million tons of oil. Since the facility is located on an ecologically-sensitive estuary, oil tankers with a capacity of 100,000-150,000 tons must transport the oil through a National Park marine reserve and a Ramsar wetland on the way to and from the Black Sea (Zenith-Gamma 2001).