Oil Transport in the Middle East

Abstract

So far as is known, the large oil-fields of the Middle East are situated in Iran and Iraq. In Iraq the principal producing field is in the neighbourhood of Kirkup to the east of the Tigris and 145 miles north of Bagdad. In Iran, oil is derived mainly from two large oil-fields. The exploitation of petroleum on a modern commercial scale in these countries is a very recent development which is producing social changes in the ways of the inhabitants, and in the economic sphere it is widening the basis of trade, increasing the revenue and bringing money into the country. In the Year Book of the Cambridge University Engineers' Association for 1936, Colonel H. E. Medlicott describes the engineering difficulties of constructing 1,600 miles of roadway in Iran, sometimes skirting precipitous hillsides. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company has already raised more than seventy million tons of oil from the two main oil-fields. In Iraq, the Iraq Petroleum Company had under its concession to construct a pipe-line system from Kirkup td the Mediterranean. It was decided that the line should debouch at two points on the Mediterranean, Haifa to the south and Tripoli to the north. The distance along the pipe-line route from Kirkup to the Euphrates is 156 miles, and from there two sections bifurcate, the southern section, going to Haifa and the northern section traversing Syria to Tripoli. The crossings of the Tigris and the Euphrates had to be made by 'Blondins' (overhead cable ways) and steel towers about 140 feet in height had to be erected in concrete to support the massive steel ropeways over the rivers which carried loads of ten tons from one bank and deposited them on the other. The author is strongly of the opinion that the Middle Eastern history of the near future will be a record of steady progress, sociologically, economically and politically.