Chechnya's oil riches become a nightmare

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Chechnya's oil riches become a nightmare

By MICHAEL SLACKMAN MOZDOK, RUSSIA Tuesday 4 April 2000 Residents of the Chechen capital Grozny warm themselves at a fire as they wait for food. Chechnya is now facing an ecologist disaster with its once main export, oil, being used by Russian soldiers to battle the rebel force.

The sky over the northern plains of Chechnya is pierced by columns of thick, acrid smoke and tinged with a bright orange glow. Large patches of earth are smeared black. Chechnya is oil country, with reserves of its own and a pipeline running across it.

For decades, oil was the mainstay of the economy. But years of lawlessness have turned this region's economic blessing into a nightmare. So much petroleum waste has been dumped here, officials say, that there is a permanent sheen on the Terek River. Most of the fish in some areas are too contaminated to eat, the water too polluted to drink.

"It is an ecological disaster," said Colonel Yuri Lavrokin, commander of a Russian army ecological safety unit.

As Russian forces continue to battle rebels in the southern mountains, Moscow has begun trying to assess the ecological climate in the north. One factor in determining whether to rebuild the devastated capital, Grozny, will be the extent of the contamination.

Chechnya's environmental problems began in Soviet times, when government-owned refineries in Grozny processed millions of tonnes of oil a year, most of it shipped through the tiny republic from other oil-producing regions, such as Azerbaijan. Millions of tonnes of waste product were unceremoniously dumped just below the surface.

But the pollution began to spread into the countryside after the Soviet Union collapsed, when Chechnya's pirate oil industry was born. Thieves stole huge quantities of oil from reserves at refineries in Grozny and tapped into the oil pipeline running from Azerbaijan. It is estimated that ninemillion tonnes of oil was being processed in Chechnya by 1992, only threemillion of which were brought up from wells.

From an environmental perspective, the problem was how the oil was being processed. Throughout the countryside, 15,000 mini-refineries were built. To extract petrol from crude oil is a relatively simple process that involves heating the oil until it separates into layers. In sophisticated commercial refineries, as much as 90per cent of the oil is used. In these mini-refineries, no more than 50per cent was used. The rest was dumped on to the ground.

Russian officials in neighboring communities often sold their own legitimate fuel reserves to commercial businesses at market prices. They then bought the cheap bootleg fuel from Chechnya, earning a profit. Chechen fuel has been found as far north as Moscow and as far east as Vladivostock.

Today many of these mini-refineries are in flames and nothing is being done to extinguish the fires.

On the streets of Gudermes, people sell petrol at roadside stands. With virtually no jobs, residents are more concerned with earning money to eat than with the region's long-term environmental problems. NEWSDAY

http://www.theage.com.au/news/20000404/A47096-2000Apr3.html

-- Martin Thompson (mthom1927@aol.com), April 03, 2000


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