In the southern suburbs ( yes I mean 'in' ) and on the outskirts of Baku city you start to find the 'nodding donkey' oil pumps. The first one I saw was next to a house and the second was beside a roadway and then all of a sudden all of that gives way to a huge jumble of old rusting steel, spilt oil, working pumps and other infrastructure that goes with oil production.
"The World is Never Enough" James Bond movie had several scenes were these oil fields were depicted. One scene I remember had James driving the Aston Martin with these oil fields in the background.
James Bond in Azerbaijan - click this link to see the oil fields I visited today.
The clip shows him driving from the oil fields into a forest - yeah as if. This is what you drive into - rolling grassed hills.
The Azerbaijan people have been mining the oil and gas for centuries and over that time a lot of debris from the industry has accumulated. In this area, from what I saw, some of the mining practices are not 'best practice'. Oil and water being pumped up from the nodding donkey pumps end up in a reservoir. Just a hole in the ground where, sometime later, the separation process starts.
Gas leaks out of the ground and some fires have been burning for years without being extinguished. The photographs below were taken at Burning Mountain about twenty kilometres outside of Baku.
"The World is Never Enough" James Bond movie had several scenes were these oil fields were depicted. One scene I remember had James driving the Aston Martin with these oil fields in the background.
James Bond in Azerbaijan - click this link to see the oil fields I visited today.
The clip shows him driving from the oil fields into a forest - yeah as if. This is what you drive into - rolling grassed hills.
The Azerbaijan people have been mining the oil and gas for centuries and over that time a lot of debris from the industry has accumulated. In this area, from what I saw, some of the mining practices are not 'best practice'. Oil and water being pumped up from the nodding donkey pumps end up in a reservoir. Just a hole in the ground where, sometime later, the separation process starts.
Gas leaks out of the ground and some fires have been burning for years without being extinguished. The photographs below were taken at Burning Mountain about twenty kilometres outside of Baku.
Gas leaks up through mud and water.
The money generated from oil and gas makes Azerbaijan a booming economy and the gloom and pollution at the Baku oil fields isn't what other modern fields are like - I hope. Glad I rode through and got to see the mountains first.
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