One thing I will remember from this froth of facts and figures is that by 2005, at the cost of $5 billion, there will be another route across the Sahara. It will be laid at a minimum of 6 feet below ground and will connect Europe to the gas fields of northern Nigeria. This will mean a lot more yellow pipes at Hassi-R’Mel and add a new name to the long and not always illustrious list of cross-Saharan trade. Gold, salt, slaves and, now, natural gas.
Day Seventy-Six
IN AMENAS
It’s ironic that, given the mighty size of Algeria, the first trace of the oil that transformed the country was found within strolling distance of Libya, near the village of In Amenas. Since then, natural gas has been discovered too, and there are four big fields running along the border, being jointly developed by Sonatrach and BP-Amoco. In Amenas now has an airport, maintenance depots, storage yards and a lot of Brits.
I’m driven out to a drill site at the base of one of the steep, flattopped, sandstone escarpments south of the town, accompanied by an Algerian from the BP/Sonatrach partnership. His name is Tobba, a geologist by profession, who came out here in 1983. He’s a genial man, small and wearing a BP cap.
He’s the first Algerian I’ve met, apart from Said, who’s been to England and I ask him for his impressions. He was struck, he said, by the contrast between the beauty of the countryside and the ugliness of public behaviour. He was with his wife and children and found the sight of embracing and kissing in the street very hard to deal with. The same with drinking. He didn’t mind bars but was embarrassed by people drunk on streets where he was walking with his children. As Tobba is clearly an educated, decent man, neither severe nor prudish, these criticisms hurt. Arabs generally behave with dignity in public, and in a society which takes no alcohol, there is a marked lack of that unreasoned, aggressive posturing that flares up so easily back home.
The drill site is a square patch of ground, fortified by an 8-foothigh sand wall, known as a berm, and heavy security paraphernalia, including a wall of lights outside, a chicane at the entrance, guard towers and a protection force of gendarmes. I later learn there are fifty of them. This is how important the gas is to Algeria.
A board at the entrance lists the personnel on site, along with their job titles. It reads like a cast list in a theatre programme. There’s Tool Pusher, Company Man, Chief Mechanic, Driller, Assistant Driller, Derrick Man and (very Shakespearian this) Roughnecks and Roustabouts.
We seem to have arrived at a bad time. The site is being dismantled and the 180-foot-high derrick lies on its side awaiting collection. A small group of British workers is supervising an Algerian workforce of loaders and drivers in blue boiler suits and turbans. Willy Wallace, a roly-poly Scot with a Viva Zapata moustache, fingers the stiff creases of a tight and suspiciously pristine outfit.
‘They made us wear these. Must have known you were coming.’
Willy’s life seesaws between down-to-earth domesticity and the almost recklessly exotic. He’s been on rigs in the North Sea, Colombia, the Congo, China and Kazakhstan. Colombia was ‘scary’. He was shot at and, as he put it, ‘had to hide under the desk a few times’. Kazakhstan was the only place in the last nine years where he didn’t need any guards with him. The other half of his life is back home in Scotland, with his wife, a son at Stirling University and a different set of drinking buddies, for whom Coca-Cola is no longer the strongest thing on offer.
He waves vigorously as a 50-tonne truck toils slowly by, the driver waving back from a cab high above our heads.
They’ve been on this site for sixty-two days. Working round the clock, it took them thirty-two of these days to drill over 8000 feet down into the desert. Gas was found but not at sufficient pressure to make production worthwhile. They’re moving on to another site, identified for them by the geologists after a three-day seismic test in which 600 miles of the Sahara was wired up and an artificial earthquake created.
According to Willy, expenditure on the ultimately fruitless work has been augmented by certain below-the-line items.
‘We had a visit from Glass Eye. Took 60,000 dollars worth of surveying equipment.’
We drive back into In Amenas. A few huts and palm trees linger on the outskirts, a dusty hint of what the village must have been like before it was engulfed by the oil industry. Now it’s dominated by compounds full of storage tanks and drilling equipment, watch-towered and double-fenced. The wind scythes across the desert, tearing at a foliage of plastic bags caught on the razor wire. A filthy sign welcomes us: ‘Throw Your Litter Away For A Clean and Beautiful Village.’
Tonight the Brits working here have laid on a party for us. As Mike Batley, our portly, solicitous host, cooks sausages on the patio of a bungalow, we could almost be back in Maidenhead. Except that we are on the equivalent of an industrial estate, with the steel walls of a maintenance shed rearing up behind us.
Mike has worked abroad for much of his life and makes me feel like a novice at this travel thing. He, on the other hand, envies our freedom to move about Algeria. Oil workers are virtual prisoners in their camps, and he bemoans the fact that we have seen more of the country in seven days than he’s seen in seven years.
Beers appear from the fridge, and a bottle or two of Algerian wine loosen tongues around the table. Everyone seems to like the desert. Mike notices how it sharpens the senses.
‘We’re spoilt for smell,’ he says. ‘Smell a rose in the desert and it’s much more acute and intense.’
Sue, a drilling engineer from Aberdeen, finds the desert different, unusual, exotic, whilst John, a geologist from Holmfirth, is passionate about sand dunes. South of the site we visited today there are some of the biggest he’s seen. Five hundred feet high.
When the conversation turns to the wider picture, the geopolitics of oil, the subject becomes murkier. Someone makes the point that the USA has vast petrochemical reserves, but it knows that the longer it can keep them in the ground the better, so American foreign policy is led by the need to find cheap energy sources beyond its boundaries.
It all seems academic here, full of sausages and red wine, under a huge sky in the serene silence of the Sahara, but a few thousand miles away, in Afghanistan, another desert is being blasted by B-52s, and no-one knows what fury this might provoke.
Day Seventy-Seven
ON THE LIBYAN BORDER
Roads are rare in the Sahara. They are usually built to exploit resources of some sort, and once they reach those resources they stop.
So it doesn’t surprise me that the road to Libya, after winding its way across a grubby oilscape of grit and shale, littered with pipes, empty cable spindles and rusting Portakabins, comes to an abrupt halt at the top of a cliff. The debris also comes to an abrupt halt. Instead, there is a magnificent view of towering, shining dunes, soothed by the wind into graceful, sensuous contours and stretching out to the east as far as the eye can see. This is Libya.
Between the dunes and the edge of the cliff is a flat and sandy valley floor, about a mile wide, and in the middle of this is a single acacia tree. This marks the border.
There is no fence or wall or guard-post or flagpole or barrier to be seen. Just the tree and, beneath it, an indistinct cluster of white dots. I’m told by one of our tireless escorts that the tree is a famous meeting place, where people on both sides of the border, Libyans and Algerians, get together to take tea and exchange news and gossip.