From oil pipelines to oil Straits: The Caspian pipeline politics and environmental protection of the Istanbul and the Canakkale Straits

Abstract

The geopolitics of the Caspian oil has been one of the most prominent issues of the post-cold war Eurasian politics and studies. Among many other subissues within this general title, selection of the pipelines and their routes are still a centre of immense concern for all sides involved in the Caspian oil business. While serious controversies are going on over the projected pipelines, some of the pipelines have recently been opened, which are used for the transportation of the early oil from the Caspian basin to the Black Sea and eventually into the Mediterranean through the Turkish Straits, which have been serving for a long time as a north‐south ‘:naval silk road’ between the Black Sea and the Mediterranean nations. By opening the way for such additional oilflow through the Straits, the increasing numbers of oil tankers passing this naturally, geographically and politically troublesome sea passage raised a tremendous amount of concerns about the environmental soundness and dangers of oil transportation through this route. This article focuses on the environmental, political and legal aspects of the Caspian pipeline debates with regard to the use of the Turkish Straits. Theselection of the routes for Caspian pipelines and the use of the Turkish Straits for existing and future oil transports from those pipelines has to be reconsidered in the light of the limits of this morphologically, climatically, naturally inconvenient waterway.