“Choose the neighbour before you choose the house.” – Arabic Proverb
A tough pill to swallow, coming to terms with the fact that you are now a landlocked country.
But credit to Iraq for moving quickly and being receptive to signing MOUs at the recent US-Iraq Business Summit.
Syria might be the scaffolding, but Kazakhstan is the schematics.
When Chevron formed the Caspian Pipeline Consortium (CPC) in the 1990s to evacuate Tengiz crude, they didn’t dig a 1,511 km trench from scratch.
They inherited a substantial portion of the existing Soviet-era pipeline infrastructure, including the old Atyrau-Samara links, and focused their capital on building the final leg to the Russian Black Sea port of Novorossiysk, upgrading pump stations and laying a new 88 km bottleneck section.
Chevron is effectively applying the same playbook here.
The distance from the Haditha hub in Iraq to the Baniyas port in Syria is roughly 800 kilometres (approximately 500 miles).
They do not need to lay 800 km of new steel.
They are inheriting the corridor of the Kirkuk-Baniyas Pipeline.
While parts of that line are old, heavily damaged or idled, the right-of-way, the geotechnical surveys, the river crossings and the footprints of the major pumping stations (the famous T-stations, T-1 through T-4) are already in place.
The CPC took around two-and-a-half years of active construction, from groundbreaking in May 1999 to the first tanker loading in November 2001.
But remember, the CPC is 1,511 km long and had to cross vast Russian steppes while also constructing a brand-new marine terminal from scratch.
At roughly 800 km, the Haditha-Baniyas line is approximately half the length of the CPC.
Furthermore, the Baniyas marine terminal on the Mediterranean already exists.
If the consortium focuses on a fast-track Phase 1—sliplining or replacing only the most compromised sections of the existing pipeline, repairing three or four key pumping stations, and using modern Drag Reducing Agents (DRAs) to push greater volumes through smaller diameters—they could realistically achieve first oil within 24 months.
Chevron is not drawing on a blank canvas in Syria; it is executing a proven strategy.
With sufficient political will and fast-tracked engineering, the Mediterranean could be receiving Iraqi crude via Syria within two years—an almost exact replica of the Caspian strategy, deployed to solve a Mesopotamian cage.
