Power Trip: From Oil Wells to Solar Cells – Our Ride to the Renewable Future. Amanda Little

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СКАЧАТЬ enough fuel to fill about four Olympic-sized swimming pools. “It adds up to roughly 12 million gallons a week, 50 million gallons a month, and—with the supply trucks carrying about 10,000 gallons of fuel apiece—a heck of a lot of truckloads.”

      Surprisingly, none of this fuel Colonel Walsh delivered actually came from Iraq’s copious oil fields, nor could it be transported by pipeline. “The Iraqi infrastructure is not to a point where we can do that,” Walsh explained. Despite the tremendous volume of oil lying beneath Iraqi soil, the country’s drilling equipment, refining facilities, and pipelines have been devastated—first by the Iran-Iraq war, then by United Nations sanctions imposed in 1990 after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait (sanctions which proscribed open-market fuel purchases from Saddam Hussein’s regime), and finally by the combat and chaos sparked by the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Intelligence officials had predicted prior to the invasion that Iraqi fuel production would increase nearly 30 percent “within several months of the end of hostilities,” and that this would then aid in fueling and funding the occupation, but in fact just the opposite has happened: Iraqi oil production fell by more than a third after the 2003 invasion (a supply plunge that contributed to the concurrent surge in global prices). By 2008, Iraq could barely meet its own internal demand for refined fuels, let alone serve the needs of the U.S. military.

      So Walsh and his logistics officials sourced bulk purchases of fuel from refineries in four neighboring countries: Kuwait, Pakistan, Turkey, and Jordan. The fuel comes in several different varieties for aviation, ground vehicles, and diesel generators. To facilitate fuel distribution, Walsh’s battalion spent the first six months of 2003 laying a tactical pipeline from the supply countries into Iraq, but eventually abandoned the effort: “It was an aboveground pipeline and very vulnerable to attack, to sabotage,” Walsh explained. His soldiers had to guard the pipeline twenty-four hours a day (wearing infrared goggles at night) to fend off thieves who would try to puncture the pipeline and siphon off fuel or, worse, bomb it. “The pipeline also proved to be an obstacle in the desert because we couldn’t maneuver vehicles over it. So we scrapped it for both security and strategic reasons and moved to a system in which all fuel distribution into Iraq is made by trucks.”

      The distribution is organized via a hub and spoke system. The DESC contracts with truck drivers to transport fuel from several major refineries in the neighboring countries to central hubs inside Iraq, known as “bag farms” for the collapsible fabric bags in which the fuel is stored. These bags, which look like gigantic pillows, can hold anywhere from 10,000 to more than 210,000 gallons of fuel each, and can be easily disguised to prevent looting and avoid aerial attacks. Local units then help transport the fuel from the bag farms to their base camps—the “spokes” of the distribution system.

      Some seven hundred supply trucks circulate on the roads of Iraq each day carrying everything from Lucky Charms and personal mail to bulletproof vests, fuel, and ammunition. Civilian truck drivers—not soldiers—drive the vehicles that transport fuel between the refineries and hubs, while military personnel man the choppers and Humvees that surround the convoys for protection.

      KBR, the biggest employer of civilian truck drivers in Iraq, won multibillion-dollar contracts to repair Iraq’s infrastructure and provide fuel delivery in the early stages of the war. A Defense Department investigation later uncovered evidence that the company had significantly overcharged taxpayers by as much as $61 million for oil distribution to troops; KBR contested the findings, but nevertheless, the Pentagon reportedly terminated the company’s fuel deliveries in Iraq.

      The job of driving supply trucks is undoubtedly dangerous, but the money has drawn many to sign on. KBR drivers who made roughly $30,000 a year in the U.S. working in truck fleets for Home Depot, SYSCO, and Walmart could get paid between $80,000 and $120,000 a year for shepherding fuel convoys in Iraq, and were eligible for a handsome tax break if they stayed in the field more than 330 days. Houston resident Stephen Heering took the assignment in 2004 of driving fuel trucks in Iraq for Halliburton (then KBR’s parent company) to help dig his family out of debt and build a nest egg for his young son’s college education. Thirty-three years old at the time, he described himself as being tired of living paycheck to paycheck; convoy driving promised financial security. But four months into his job on the roads of Iraq, Heering quit after rebels ransacked his truck and threatened him at gunpoint. “[KBR] said it would get better, but people started getting hurt bad,” Heering said in a Time interview. “They’ll find new meat. I guess that’s the way it is in the money world. If it makes ’em money, they don’t care if it costs them a life.”

      In 2005, a Halliburton convoy of four fuel trucks suffered an ambush in which three drivers were killed. Preston Wheeler, of Mena, Arkansas, captured the attack on a video that later became a YouTube sensation: “Truck 5 cannot move, please help me, I am taking fire,” Wheeler pleads in the background. “I am fixin’ to get killed, goddammit…I have no gun. I am by myself.” Wheeler was shot and lost some mobility in his right arm. Soon thereafter, he lost his job at KBR. “They don’t no more care about me,” Wheeler later said in a television appearance, “than they care about a dog walking on the road.”

      In addition to the threat of ambushes, convoy drivers face frequent breakdowns caused by the merciless heat, engine-clogging sand, and the unforgiving terrain of pocked dirt roads. Civilian truckers wear body armor but are not permitted to carry firearms. The convoys are required to run their routes even in the worst conditions of weather and unrest—after all, the more challenging the conditions get, the more supplies the soldiers need to fend off attacks, stay cool, and keep the hospitals running. Not surprisingly, the military has struggled with a shortage of drivers. “We got trucks,” Army sergeant Frank Vallejo told the Baltimore Sun; “what we don’t have is drivers, and we are scraping below the bottom of the barrel.”

      When I questioned Colonel Walsh about the long-term viability of the fuel supply chain for the war in Iraq, he stressed the “unwavering commitment” within the military to keeping it running smoothly. “It’s as important to the survival of our soldiers as food itself—more so, even.” He told the famous World War II story of General Patton’s Third Army: when it was running low on fuel at the Meuse River during its race across France into Germany, having outrun its fuel supplies, the general ordered his men to drive until they ran out of gas and “then get out and walk.” “My men can eat their waist belts,” Patton told his friend and commanding general, Dwight D. Eisenhower, “but my tanks need gas.” Tragically, Patton couldn’t get new fuel supplies fast enough to penetrate Berlin. (This gave the Germans time to regroup, and it was the Russians who later took the city.) The general called this failure the “unforgiving minute”—the window of time in which he would have made his place in history had he been allocated the fuel.

      Having recalled this story, Walsh summed up his team’s work securing fuel convoys in Iraq as “mission critical.” There’s no getting around the fact that “we are a hydrocarbon military,” he added. “Everything runs on oil.”

      EMBARGOED

      In the decades following World War II, in the hope of maintaining access to cheap and abundant oil supplies, the United States began offering ever bigger favors to its allies in the Middle East. It began to furnish the Saudis (and at times Iran and Iraq as well) with military aid, including state-of-the-art weaponry and combat planes, private security forces, and military training to protect American-friendly regimes. Despite these efforts, the United States eventually got a bitter taste of what it feels like to be oil-starved.

      I have no memory of the Arab oil embargo; I was born in 1974, the year after it began. But when I asked my neighbor how it affected her family, she recalled bicycling to work so that there was enough gas in the car to get her kids to school. She also vividly remembered the shock of seeing lines for the first time at the gas pump. As the embargo crippled U.S. oil supplies, stations began limiting drivers to 10 gallons of fuel at each fill-up and shut off their pumps on Sundays. СКАЧАТЬ