It's not just the Russian-Georgian con-flict that has made August such a rotten month for the West's favourite oil pipeline. On August 5th a pumping station on the 1,100-mile (1,760km) Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (btc) pipeline in eastern Turkey was set ablaze. The pkk Kurdish separatists claimed responsibility. The entire route, which had been carrying 850,000 barrels of Caspian crude oil a day to Western markets, shut down and world oil prices, which had been falling, nudged up again, bp, which spent $4 billion on btc and still manages it, put a brave face on things, saying that the disruption would be temporary. But the station was still burning when Georgia and Russia went to war two days later.rnThe company's other oil pipeline, Baku-Supsa, carrying crude to Georgia's Black Sea coast (now blockaded by Russian warships), had only recently reopened but was also forced to shut down. On August 12th, even as the conflict was fading, bp stopped putting gas into the Baku-Erzurum gas pipeline. Thernonly pipeline from Azerbaijan that was fully operational this week is the one running through Russian soil to the port of Novorossiisk.
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