Treasures of the Caspian: The Coming Struggle for Energy East and West

Abstract

For nearly two thousand years, oil and gas have flowed in the imaginations of those who have come to the Caspian Sea region. When Marco Polo traveled the Silk Road to the city of Baku in 1264, he found “a fountain from which oil springs in vast abundance,” volcanoes of mud built by seeps of natural gas, and a flaming hill where burned the “eternal fire” of Absheron.1 By the time the Nobel brothers arrived from Sweden in the 1870s to establish one of the great early petroleum companies, Baku had become the largest center of oil production in the world.