Red Storm Rising (1986) Read Free Page B

the petroleum complex.
    The Nizhnevartovsk oil production field accounts for roughly 31. 3 percent of total Soviet crude oil, according to the American Petroleum Institute, and the adjacent, newly built Nizhnevartovsk refinery for approximately 17.3 percent of petroleum distillate production.
    “Fortunately for them,” Donald Evans, a spokesman for the Institute explained, “oil underground is pretty hard to burn, and you can expect the fire to burn itself out in a few days.” The refinery, however, depending on how much of it was involved, could be a major expense. “When they go, they usually go pretty big,” Evans said. “But the Russians have sufficient excess refining capacity to take up the slack, especially with all the work they’ve been doing at their Moscow complex.”
    Evans was unable to speculate on the cause of the fire, saying, “The climate could have something to do with it. We had a few problems in the Alaskan fields that took some careful work to solve. Beyond that, any refinery is a potential Disneyland for fire, and there simply is no substitute for intelligent, careful, well-trained crews to run them.”
    This is the latest in a series of setbacks to the Soviet oil industry. It was admitted only last fall at the plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee that production goals in both the Eastern Siberian fields “had not entirely fulfilled earlier hopes.”
    This seemingly mild statement is being seen in Western circles as a stinging indictment of the policies of now-departed Petroleum Industry minister Zatyzhin, since replaced by Mikhail Sergetov, former chief of the Leningrad Party apparatus, regarded as a rising star in the Soviet Party. A technocrat with a background of engineering and Party work, Sergetov’s task of reorganizing the Soviet oil industry is seen as a task that could last years. AP-BA-01-31 0501EST•FL•
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MOSCOW, R.S.F.S.R.
    Mikhail Eduardovich Sergetov never had a chance to read the wire service report. Summoned from his official dacha in the birch forests surrounding Moscow, he’d flown at once to Nizhnevartovsk and stayed for only ten hours before being recalled to make his report in Moscow. Three months on the job, he thought, sitting in the empty forward cabin of the IL-86 airliner, and this has to happen!
    His two principal deputies, a pair of skilled young engineers, had been left behind and were trying even now to make sense of the chaos, to save what could be saved, as he reviewed his notes for the Politburo meeting later in the day. Three hundred men were known to have died fighting the fire, and, miraculously, fewer than two hundred citizens in the city of Nizhnevartovsk. That was unfortunate, but not a matter of great significance except insofar as those trained men killed would eventually have to be replaced by other trained men drawn from the staffs of other large refineries.
    The refinery was almosty totally destroyed. Reconstruction would take a minimum of two to three years, and would account for a sizable percentage of national steel pipe production, plus all the other specialty items unique to a facility of this type: Fifteen thousand million rubles. And how much of the special equipment would have to be purchased from foreign sources—how much precious hard currency and gold would be wasted?
    And that was the good news.
    The bad news: the fire that had engulfed the production field had totally destroyed the welltops. Time to replace: at least thirty-six months!
    Thirty-six months, Sergetov reflected bleakly, if we can divert the drillrigs and crews to redrill every damned well and at the same time rebuild the EOR systems. For a minimum of eighteen months the Soviet Union will have an enormous shortfall in oil production. Probably more like thirty months. What will happen to our economy?
    He pulled a pad of lined paper from his briefcase and began to make some calculations. It was a three-hour flight, and Sergetov did not notice