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BP’s Caucasus gas pipeline blows up, as conflict escalates along route
Blog post -
Oct 7, 2012
A blast on the Turkish section of BP’s South Caucasus Gas Pipeline has shut down fuel exports, putting a stop to gas exports from Azerbaijan to Turkey. The explosion took place in a forest between the villages of Yagbasan and Catag, in remote north-eastern Turkey, near the borders with Georgia & Armenia. The Turkish Ministry...

Bowing to a dead dictator: pipelines, personality cults and the US Ambassador
Blog post -
Oct 5, 2012
Azeri democracy activists were enraged when in September, the new US Ambassador to Baku bowed down in front of the memorial to the late dictator Heydar Aliyev, father of the current dictator Ilham Aliyev. The State Department initially tried to claim that Richard Morningstar had only laid a wreath of flowers at the memorial to...
Paul Mason discusses #TheOilRoad at the LRB Bookshop
Multimedia -
Oct 5, 2012
On 4 October 2012, Newsnight economics editor, Paul Mason, was supposed to join Platform to discuss The Oil Road: Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London at the LRB Bookshop. Unfortunately, Paul was called away at the last minute for filming, so he kindly made a pre-record of himself discussing some of...

Tales of Transition
Multimedia -
Sep 13, 2012
James Marriott talks about Platform’s new book The Oil Road in advance of the Transition Network Conference taking place at Battersea Arts Centre. James will be inspiring people with stories of his travels from the oil fields of the Caspian to the refineries and financial centres of Northern Europe. He will also consider how we...

An “unusual travel book” along a pipeline
Blog post -
Aug 21, 2012
A Guest Blog by John de Falbe of Sandoe’s Books. I just received an early copy of “The Oil Road: A Journey from the Caspian Sea to the City of London” by Platform’s James Marriott and Mika Minio-Paluello, published by Verso, due out in mid-September. I read it in manuscript: it’s a brilliant analysis of...

The Oil Road – Journeys from the Caspian Sea to the City of London
Publication -
Aug 7, 2012
The new Paperback edition has a brand new Afterword… “★★★★★…The Oil Road opens the lid on the often-shady energy economy, weaving absorbing travel reportage into powerful investigative journalism…. If you want to know why oil matters, read this book.” – Time Out (book of the week) “An elegantly written travel book…will make you think the next...

RBS & ECGD offer billions in public money to expand Caspian fossil fuel infrastructure
Blog post -
Jun 25, 2012
While the Tory government forces through unpopular cutbacks to the NHS, education and pensions, British public institutions plan to invest hundreds of millions – if not billions – of pounds into new fossil fuel infrastructure on the Caspian. Both the British Export Credit Agency (the ECGD – recently rebranded "UK Export Finance") and the Royal...
Nazim Hikmet: “The Oil Road” meets “The Ballad of those who drink the Sun”
Blog post -
Jun 16, 2012
To mark Sunday’s performance of “The Ballad of Those tho Drink the Sun” celebrating the life and work of Turkish poet Nazim Hikmet, Platform is publishing a book excerpt on Nazim Hikmet, poetry & technology, the Euphrates versus BP’s Baku-Ceyhan pipeline. This is an edited excerpt from our upcoming book “The Oil Road: A Journey...
Exploring The Oil Road – Two Platform events in Bristol and London
Blog post -
May 18, 2012
There are two Platform events coming up which explore themes in our forthcoming book The Oil Road by Mika Minio and James Marriott, due out in September. The first event is a talk in the Bristol Festival of Ideas – What if we left the oil in the ground? Taking place at Arnolfini on Sunday 20th...