ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the contemporary struggle over the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) project. It presents some of the background on the pipeline project and describes the situation in relation to the actual and potential impacts of the project. The chapter examines British Petroleum's (BP) efforts to cope with potential resistance to the pipeline project. It highlights how development of the BTC pipeline project is central to BP’s strategy, and how the company is thoroughly committed to it. Western companies returned a few months later, however, after the British Expeditionary Force had occupied Baku, and the Baku-Tbilisi-Batumi railway operated from November 1918 to August 1919, to ensure Western access to the oil. BP began negotiating with the Azerbaijani authorities in the middle of 1990, about a year prior to Azerbaijani independence. The two pipelines—Baku-Novorossiysk and Baku-Supsa—have a combined capacity of 265,000 barrels of crude oil per day.
