How does oil get from Azerbaijan to Canada?

Our son, Spencer, 11, and I have recently taken up a game. Basically, I name a country, and he finds it on the globe.

This was inspired by his favourite TV show, Young Sheldon (spinoff from The Big Bang Theory). In it, young Sheldon recently pointed out that South America and Africa fit together like puzzle pieces. That fascinated Spencer, and now I’m trying to drill some geography into him.

I think the next country I will ask him to find is Azerbaijan. I was saving that for way down the line, as a bonus round sort of item. But in this case, it’s time-appropriate.

That’s because on March 26, Azerbaijan jumped out at me like a sore thumb from a story in the Calgary Herald.

It pointed out that in 2017, Canada imported on average 670,000 barrels of oil per day. About half came from the United States, and the rest came from Saudi Arabia, Azerbaijan, Norway, Nigeria, the United Kingdom, Angola, Russia, Columbia, Kazakhstan, Oman, Ghana, the Ivory Coast, and finally, Trinidad and Tobago.

If you know anything about history, you will now that the temptation to capture the oilfields of Baku, Azerbaijan, led to Adolf Hitler’s downfall. To take, and keep, Baku and its oil, he needed to take a little place called Stalingrad. It was there, in the greatest battle in the history of mankind, that the Second World War was turned. Azerbaijan’s oil, in other words, is important to the extreme.

Azerbaijan is interesting in that it is on a coast, but not an oceanic coast. It’s on the Caspian Sea, which means it can send product by ship to Russia, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran, most, if not all, don’t really need to buy oil from anyone else. So how does oil get from Azerbaijan to Canada?

It starts with pipelines. There are three pipeline options to reach tidewater. One is to go through Russia to Novorossiysk, on the Black Sea. The second, and shortest, goes through Georgia to Supsa, also on the Black Sea. The third passes through Georgia then Turkey to Ceyhan, at the very northeast corner of the Mediterranean Sea.

For two of these options, tankers would load in the Black Sea, pass through the Turkish Straits, the Bosporus and Dardanelles. In doing so, it would pass Istanbul, a city that makes Vancouver and the lower mainland look like a village.

The tanker would then pass through the Aegean Sea; a more rock-strewn body of water would be hard to find. It’s substantially bigger, and rockier, than anything on Canada’s West Coast.

Alternatively, the tanker would originate in Mediterranean. A quick glance on Google Maps shows no less than five major oil tanker loading facilities along the Turkish coast in that area.

From whichever port these tankers would originate, they would then cross the Mediterranean, through the Strait of Gibraltar, and cross the North Atlantic Ocean. That ocean is not always known for being pleasant in winter.

On our side of the pond, it would either enter the Bay of Fundy and go to the Irving Refinery at St. John, New Brunswick, or head into the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the St. Lawrence River. There it would either dock at Quebec City or Montreal and discharge its cargo. I suppose if the tanker was small enough, it could traverse the St. Lawrence Seaway and service any of the numerous refineries on the Great Lakes, particularly on the American side, but that might be a stretch.

Don’t even get me started on how oil from Kazakhstan would get to Canada. It’s in the centre of Asia.

My point is that Eastern Canada sources its oil from places like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan. That oil takes a long journey past plenty of shorelines and crossing an occasionally treacherous ocean. But Canadians, in our infinite wisdom, could not see fit to build the Energy East Pipeline. That pipeline, all underground, never crossing an ocean, never passing rocky shores, entirely within our borders, was seen as the end of the world.

And similarly, the Left Coast seems to think the Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain Expansion Pipeline will also be the end of the world.

Perhaps the people of the Lower Mainland in British Columbia should spend some time on Google Earth and take a look at how much tanker facilities and traffic exist around Turkey, or in the Persian Gulf. The world has not ended there, and it’s highly doubtful it will here, either.

Brian Zinchuk is editor of Pipeline News. He can be reached at [email protected]