Made on Earth (3 page)

14 August 2005

By the evening, the
Madras
is only a third full. The filling process takes between 36 and 40 hours. A tanker like the
Madras
can hold around a million barrels of crude oil – that’s around 159 million litres. The loading and unloading of the six tanks inside the ship
is coordinated by Portuguese first mate and boarding engineer, Raul. A warning system of sensors controlled by a high-tech computer program makes sure that the tanks are filled evenly. If one section becomes overloaded, the hull could buckle like an empty shoebox.

During the filling process, the oil company is in frequent contact over the radio. They want to know exactly how everything is going. For them, time
is
money. It costs the oil company $50,000 US dollars a day to rent the tanker. That is a cost of at least $75,000 US dollars
before
the oil is even on board! Every hour costs them another $2,080 dollars. The oil company tries to put pressure on the crew to speed up the filling process, but Captain van der Valt and his crew are experienced sailors and don’t get flustered easily.

15 August 2005

For most of the Arabians living in the Gulf, driving their expensive cars along the Sheikh Zayed road to the mosque on a Friday, there is not a single oil rig or refinery in sight. They don’t have to think about the oil reserves – just knowing they are there is enough. If you’re the son of a citizen of Dubai, like 13-year-old Mohammed, you don’t have to worry about oil or money. Many Arabians in the Gulf make a living either from rent – as landlords for the shops and apartments, or from shares and investments. Others sit on the board of directors for local and international companies (in Dubai, international companies cannot undertake business without a local contact). Mohammed’s father is one of the directors of a company that runs Dubai’s oil treatment plant and operates the oil distribution terminal. Once or twice a day he looks over the paperwork and signs a few documents – the rest takes care of itself.

In some cases in Dubai, the interest rates, financial rewards and levels of business responsibility awarded to each citizen are closely linked to their family name. The closer a citizen’s family is to the ‘tribes’ of Dubai’s ruling family, the bigger the financial rewards. A tribe is made up of all the members of a particular family. The tribe arranges everything for its members throughout their lives. Mohammed is part of this tribe culture. He attends school in the mornings, plus twice weekly he attends Qur’an school in the afternoons. In a year he will be sent to a boarding school in Switzerland.

At present however, every Friday Mohammed goes to the mosque in Dubai and then has a meal with his family. He may only speak if he is spoken to – this is an unwritten law in Arabian countries. The family meal follows strict traditional rules. The men wear long white robes known as kandura and guthra (headscarves) on their heads. They keep to themselves, while the women and young children eat in a separate group. The food is laid out on a huge, fine Persian carpet. There are countless small sharing dishes to start the meal: marinated aubergines, olives, rich hummus, toasted sesame seeds, marinated garlic, cheese, and a range of delicious sauces. The traditional main dishes are grilled lamb kebabs, roasted lamb, and marinated lamb in a rich sauce, served with a mountain of rice.

Traditionally, people only eat using their right hand. If someone put their left hand in the communal rice, the other diners would recoil in disgust. This is because hundreds of years ago, the nomadic tribes of the Gulf used their left hands to wipe themselves after going to the toilet. Even though nowadays people can afford bathroom suites with inbuilt showers, this knowledge from the past has left a lasting impression: you
only
eat with your right hand.

It could be said the citizens of Dubai, like other Arabians in the Gulf, are torn between the present and the past. They have built the most modern city of the 21st century. They drive fast cars, wear expensive rings and watches and play golf. They travel to New York, London and Munich with huge entourages and stay in luxurious hotels. But at the same time, they don’t want to be separated from their traditional way of life.

After dinner the men sit and smoke shisha (flavoured tobacco) and drink strong tea or coffee. The head of the tribe asks, “Mohammed, have you thought about where you would like to study in the long term? Have you picked a good university in America or England yet?”

Mohammed blushes and looks down at the floor. He doesn’t want to lie, but he knows that telling the truth just isn’t worth the hassle. His father answers for him, “If it was up to Mohammed, he would become an ice-hockey player!”

All the men in the room laugh. Unfortunately for Mohammed, even the citizens of one of the richest countries in the world can’t always do what they want. The fathers and the heads of the tribes always have the last word. The leader of Mohammed’s family tribe sets down his tea glass, folds his hands and looks at Mohammed. “If we all followed our dreams, we would all be racing drivers, poker players and camel jockeys!” he says. “But then Dubai would only have a few skyscrapers, and they would all belong to foreign investors. We are strongest when we work together. Allah has chosen a role for each of our family members. Dubai’s oil will soon run out. The money we have made has been cleverly invested, but what we are missing, young man, is
knowledge
. How do you build a skyscraper? How do you create a mobile phone network and boost the signal to improve reception? How do you manage a hotel or a theme park with over a thousand employees? To answer all of these questions we still need outside help, and this is why our cleverest sons have to become engineers and managers. When I speak of our clever sons, I mean
you
Mohammed!”

Mohammed looks at the floor and lets his mind wander – his thoughts are of ice hockey, just as they are at every Friday family dinner. Finally, it’s time for him to leave. His chauffeur drives him to the winter sports centre, which includes an enormous snow park with a real snow ski slope. When you have vast amounts of oil and gas at your disposal, the cost of refrigeration isn’t a problem. Mohammed waits for his teammates in the changing rooms. He pulls on his ice hockey shirt and puts on his skates – both were ‘Made in the USA’. On the ice rink, his coach is already carving out a route across the ice. He smacks the puck into the left-hand corner of the goal. Mohammed’s trainer is Canadian and used to play ice hockey professionally in Canada. How much ex-professionals get paid to teach young people ice hockey in Dubai is a state secret. If you want to know more about winter sports in Dubai, visit
www.skidxb.com
.

Even though Mohammed is wearing a padded ice hockey shirt he feels a little chilly. A fleece body warmer would come in handy right now. He obviously wouldn’t wear one like mine though: his would be a designer fleece. Not that it matters anyway though. My fleece is not even close to being finished. In fact, its journey has only just begun.

3

Oil Tankers: The Whipping Boys of Globalisation

16 August 2005

It’s morning at Jebel Ali Port. While Sadek cycles to work at Dubai’s old port and Mohammed walks to school, the
Madras
finally leaves Dubai. There is barely a metre between the heavily loaded ship and the seabed, so the tanker moves cautiously until it enters deeper water. The raw materials for my fleece are finally on their way to Chittagong, Bangladesh, at a speed of exactly 15 knots (around 24 kilometres an hour). The tanker’s speed is closely regulated by the oil company, which pays for the fuel used to run the ship.

Captain van der Valt cannot relax until the
Madras
has sailed through the treacherous waters of the Persian Gulf and the Strait of Hormuz. He must stay on the bridge to navigate regardless of how long the journey takes, which can be up to 16 hours. The sea is shallow and the Gulf is narrow, and the many tankers and ships sailing through the bay have to pass in extremely close proximity with one another. The coast of the strictly Islamic country of Iran stretches out behind the
Madras
. Boats patrol its territory vigilantly.

After almost 150 kilometres the
Madras
reaches the Strait of Hormuz, where the shipping lane is only 100 metres wide. Thankfully, there is no queue of tankers waiting to pass through the strait, so the
Madras
can sail on without stopping. After almost 13 hours, the
Madras
finally reaches the Oman Gulf, which opens out onto the Indian Ocean. Finally Captain van der Valt can leave the bridge, go to bed and sleep.

The rest of the tanker’s route is simple. It will sail across the Indian Ocean to the most southern point of India, and from there it will head in the direction of Bengal. For most of this 4,500 kilometre stretch of sailing, the helmsman will have only one instruction: steady as she goes. The rest of the crew have to focus on keeping the motor running at its optimum capacity and on the general state of the tanker and its cargo. Carrying 180,000 tonnes of crude oil can be likened to ferrying around a sleeping, irritable dragon. In order to prevent rough seas from causing the oil to slosh around dangerously inside the ship, the loading space is divided into six individual tanks, which are supported with steel beams. If the interior of the tanker was simply one huge hollow space, the pressure of the seawater from outside would crush the ship like a shoebox as soon as it was emptied.

20 August 2005

The monitoring of the ship and its cargo takes place from the control room at the back of the ship. This means that Dutch Captain van der Valt, Portuguese first mate and boarding engineer Raul Jorges and the 21 Filipino crew members spend their entire journey in one small area at the rear of the ship.

Only one crew member regularly ventures out onto the deck: Raul, the first mate. In order to stay fit, he spends his free time using the 200 metre steel giant as a running track, jogging past pipes, thick anchor chains, hose pumps and huge vents. Raul only has to do 30 laps of the deck to run 12 kilometres, which he tries to do daily. Here in the tropics however, the temperature reaches 30° Celsius by mid-morning, and Raul breaks into a sweat so quickly that he usually only runs about half that distance. After all, he needs to hold back some energy for his daily tasks on the ship and for his favourite hobby, chatting online.

Super Tankers

The 194 metre long
Madras
is a
LR2
(
Large Range 2
) tanker, built for covering medium stretches of water and entering shallow harbours. She can hold around 125,000 tonnes of crude oil or other liquids and has a 125,000 deadweight tonnage. (The deadweight tonnage is the maximum possible weight a ship can safely carry, and is often abbreviated to DWT).

Super tankers are categorised as
VLCC
’s (
Very Large Crude Carriers
, which can carry over 200,000 DWT) and
ULCC
’s (
Ultra Large Crude Carriers
, which can carry over 300,000 DWT). These days most super tankers are between 310 and 350 metres long, have a capacity of up to 350,000 DWT, and are run by 30 to 40 crew members.

But what
is
350,000 DWT? A super tanker in the
ULCC
class can hold two million barrels, or 318 million litres, of crude oil. That is the equivalent of 17,000 road tankers.

Super tankers in excess of 400 metres have been built, but they are difficult to control and can only use a limited number of shipping routes due to their enormous size. Even super tankers of 300 to 350 metres in length can only dock at a few harbours, due to the depth of their hulls.

On board the
Madras
, first mate Raul thinks the Internet is an amazing invention. He spends a huge amount of his free time on board the ship discussing his views online with people all over the world. He shares his extensive knowledge about the oil industry, machinery and shipping routes on online forums. He also uses the Internet to let off steam. It really annoys Raul that no one likes tanker ships. Admittedly, oil tankers aren’t beautiful; in fact they’re pretty ugly. But oil tankers are an integral tool for the whole of the human race. Super tankers are also the largest steel constructions ever built by humans. At up to 400 metres in length, many are larger than the Eiffel Tower in Paris, which is only 320 metres high. Furthermore, the Eiffel Tower is made up of lots of small pieces to form a large steel frame. The body of a tanker, on the other hand, is made of vast sheets of welded steel. A double-thick exterior wall also protects newer tankers. From 2015 this will be the official standard for all tankers worldwide.