The World in 2050_ Four Forces Shaping Civilization's Northern Future - Laurence C. Smith [96]
Soviet planning didn’t turn out exclusively bad results. The next time you pay your natural gas utility bill or fill up your fuel tank, you might nod your head to some ghosts of Soviet planners past: If not for their uneconomic, market-forces-be-damned decision to develop a remote Arctic swamp half a continent away from Moscow, you’d surely be paying a lot more than you just did.
The West Siberian Lowland is a vast, soggy plain bounded by the Ural Mountains in the west and the Yenisei River in the east and from 52° to 73° N latitude. It spans nearly one thousand miles in every direction, is one-third the area of the continental United States, and nearly six times larger than Germany. Weather alternates between a long subzero polar night in winter and dank mosquito heaven in summer. It is blanketed in wet, semifrozen peat and covered with lakes; its northern half is permanently frozen in permafrost. The fate of this frozen, carbon-rich peat, which is relatively fresh (<12,000 years old), is discussed in Chapter 9. But trapped in the rocks below the peat, thousands of feet down, we find another form of carbon that is considerably older. It is the cooked remains of twenty-three trillion tons of organic-rich muck that settled to the bottom of a long-gone sea between 152 and 146 million years ago. That muck is now called the Bazhenov Shale,404 and it has changed not only Russia but the entire world.
New Hydrocarbon Cities
In 1960 West Siberia was empty except for mosquitoes and aboriginal reindeer herders. But when four supergiant oil fields were discovered there between 1962 and 1965, Soviet planners back in Moscow made an extraordinary decision. The USSR would massively develop the West Siberian Lowland, no matter how stunningly remote it was. Never mind that there was no good way to get there, that it was loaded with permafrost, frozen solid in winter, and a flooded swamp in spring. Never mind that everything would have to be built from scratch—ports, roads, railroads, drilling pads, and pipelines—by sending boats up the Ob’ River. Never mind that the magnitude of the initial investment would mean the venture could not be profitable for decades. It was a historically crazy decision that could never be done by private energy companies today.405
For years Moscow poured money into a place few Russians had even heard of. It was east of the Urals, for starters, so might as well have been on the moon. But three decades later the supergiant oil fields Samotlar, Fedorovskoye, and Mamontovskoye were household names. From the region’s tens of thousands of wells flowed one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas. The once-empty boggy plain was dotted with cities—Surgut, Nizhnevartovsk, Noyabr’sk, Novy Urengoy, and others—and a population of over three million people.
I have been to these cities and driven across thousands of miles of West Siberia.406 Much of it is still empty and indescribably beautiful in the way that only endless mossy bogs, tea-colored rivers, and scraggly forests can be, silently existing under a surreally glowing northern sky. But entrenched across this Pleistocene still-life is the spoor of the oil and gas industry: wide paved highways, belching bulldozers and diesel trucks with tires taller than your head, thousands of wells, and a labyrinth of pipelines streaming west. Piled high are stacks of rusty pipe, mountains of sand, and jumbled iron graveyards of cannibalized trucks. Our grubby faces were stared at in disbelief over surrendered American passports:407 To West Siberians, a clump of dirty, sunburned field scientists wearing fleece and rubber boots hardly fit the profile. To them, Americans are smiling oil company executives, with briefcases and business suits.
Because of the West Siberian Lowland, the Russian Federation is now the world’s largest producer of natural gas and second-largest producer of oil. It is home to her major oil companies and Gazprom, the state-owned