About Azerbaijan Oil Industry

Azerbaijan Oil Industry

Azerbaijan Oil Industry is the scientific-technical and production journal of the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, SOCAR, published in Baku in Azerbaijani, Russian and English. It is among the oldest continuously rooted industrial journals in the world: its own official history, published by SOCAR, traces it to January 1899, when the Baku oil industry's convention body began publishing the journal Neftyanoe Delo, Oil Work, in Russian, and records that in May 1920, by decision of the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijan SSR, Oil Work was renamed Azerbaijan Oil Industry, the title it still carries. Directory descriptions that date the magazine simply to 1920 therefore capture only its renaming, not its origin, a correction this profile makes explicitly on the authority of the journal's own published history. The journal's registered details underline its character as a working industry publication rather than a newsstand magazine: ISSN 0365-8554, monthly frequency, circulation of 1,000 to 1,200 copies, distribution to SOCAR enterprises and organisations, research and design institutes, higher schools, joint-stock companies and foreign firms, and an editorial office at 88a Zardabi Avenue in Baku. Across more than a century its pages have recorded the technical development of one of the world's oldest oil industries, and the journal itself describes the result without false modesty as a specific industry encyclopedia.

Origins as Neftyanoe Delo in 1899

The journal began in Baku at the height of the first Baku oil boom, when the Absheron peninsula was one of the largest oil-producing regions on earth and its producers had organised themselves in a permanent convention body, the Baku Oil Industry Workers Conventions Union. In 1898 that body resolved to publish, and in January 1899 the first issue of Neftyanoe Delo appeared in Russian, published twice a month. Its first editorial note, quoted in the journal's official history, promised to reflect the issues and needs of the oil industry as a whole, to publish data on oil production, consumption and distribution and the operation of refineries, and to attend to the mechanical and economic aspects of production, refining, transport, storage and marketing, the connection of the industry with the steam fleet, and the state of Russian and foreign petroleum markets. The young journal also covered oilfield geology in Azerbaijan and beyond, the state of reserves in the Caucasus and Absheron, and prospects for new oil and gas regions, and it regularly published, as supplements, the stenographs of the Baku oil workers' conventions and annual Reviews of Baku Petroleum Industry. So authoritative did those Baku statistical publications become, the journal's history notes, that specialists abroad recognised them as the pattern on which petroleum statistics in many countries were later prepared.

A journal of the boom-era Baku oil world

Oil Work was a serious petroleum manual and a collection of scientific papers by leading professionals and mining engineers of the Russian Empire, and its reach grew quickly with its industry. From 1900 it maintained a correspondent bureau in London, and by 1910 subscription offices existed in all the large cities of Russia, with journal exchanges conducted with numerous domestic and foreign petroleum periodicals. It published information on the little-known Russian Nobel prizes connected with the industry, the Ludwig Prize in St Petersburg for research on metallurgy and oil, awarded in 1896, 1898 and 1905, and the Emmanuel Nobel Prize founded in Baku in 1904 for the best work and discoveries in the oil sphere, awarded in 1909, 1910, 1911 and 1914 under rules that made it international, open to Russians and foreigners alike. The journal was not confined to engineering. Separate sections addressed social questions decided at the oil workers' conventions, including the improvement of workers' living conditions, medical and sanitary provision, life and injury insurance, water supply, schools, public reading and libraries, and the journal reported on convention payments for aid to the wounded and war needs totalling up to one million roubles during the First World War. That breadth makes its pre-revolutionary run a primary source for the social as well as technical history of boom-era Baku.

War, closure and revival, 1917 to 1920

The revolutions of 1917 broke the journal's world. Oil Work continued through the First World War, recording how the war had totally disorganised the country's economy, and its last issues of 1917 warned that the oil industry met 1918 in hard, if not catastrophic, conditions. In May 1918, by decision of the Baku Bolshevik Council of People's Commissars, the journal was closed, as most editions of the former Russian Empire were. Its revival was an act of the Azerbaijan Democratic Republic, which renewed publication in September 1918, and the last issue under the old title appeared in March 1920. In May 1920, after Soviet power was established in Azerbaijan, the Council of People's Commissars of the Azerbaijan SSR renamed Oil Work as Azerbaijan Oil Industry. The renaming was more than cosmetic. The industry it served had been nationalised, the state company Azneft had been formed, and the journal now belonged to a planned, state-run oil sector. Yet the continuity of title lineage, staff expertise and subject matter across three regimes, imperial, republican and Soviet, within twenty-one years, is the essential fact of the journal's early history, and it set the pattern for a publication that would outlast every political order it served.

The Soviet decades and technical progress

Under its new name the journal became the oldest press organ of the Azerbaijani oil sphere and a source of scientific-technical and production information popular, in its own account, not only in the republic but far beyond it. Its pages reflected the major priorities of technical progress in the industry, the same industry whose chronology includes the first offshore oil extraction in the world in Bibi-Heybat Bay in 1924, the rapid mechanisation and electrification of the Baku fields in the 1920s, the first inclined well in the USSR in 1933, and the beginnings of offshore construction on piles at Artyom Island, now Pirallahi, in 1934. In 1934 the journal began publishing Fatulla Rustambeyov's series setting out, for the first time, the theoretical and practical basis of underwater oil deposit exploration and the construction of sea wells in the Caspian. That item, preserved in Azerbaijan International's oil chronology, captures the journal's function precisely: it was the medium in which Azerbaijani engineers first argued, in print, the techniques that would later make the Caspian an offshore oil province. As Azerbaijani production rose to its historic Soviet peak of 23.5 million tons in 1940, a record not broken until 2005, the journal documented the drilling, geology and production science behind the figures, and it continued through the war and post-war decades as the industry's technical memory.

Authors, editors and the editorial board

The journal's authority rests on who wrote for it. Its official history lists among its published authors L. S. Leybenzon, D. V. Golubyatnikov, I. M. Gubkin, M. V. Abramovich, V. G. Shukhov, Y. H. Mammadaliyev, A. Kh. Mirzajanzadeh, Kh. B. Yusifzadeh, F. I. Samedova, I. S. Guliyev and many other leading professionals and production leaders, a roster that spans the founders of Soviet petroleum science and the academicians who built Azerbaijan's own oil scholarship. Its chief editors over the whole publication period have included I. M. Asadov, A. J. Amirov, M. K. Seyid-Rza and A. Kh. Mirzajanzadeh, and academicians I. M. Gubkin and Y. H. Mammadaliyev served at different periods as members of its editorial staff. The journal states that its editorship and editorial board, consisting of leading scientists and professionals of the oil industry, work with its national and foreign author staff on maintaining the edition's scientific-technical status and profile, and that it welcomes papers of scientific and practical interest corresponding to that profile. It also claims a significant role in preparing highly qualified personnel for the industry, since generations of Azerbaijani oil engineers first encountered advanced practice through its articles. For historians, the author lists matter as evidence: a journal edited by academicians and written by field engineers is simultaneously a scientific publication and an organ of the industry it describes.

Scope and sections today

The journal's present structure, as published by SOCAR, is organised in twelve major sections: geology and geophysics; well drilling; oil and gas field development and exploitation; oil and the sea; oil refining and petroleum chemistry; oilfield equipment; economy, management and law; ecology; oil and gas preparation and transportation; industrial process automation; nanotechnologies in the oil industry; and young scientists and specialists. Alongside them sit subdivisions for production and experience exchange, foreign experience, young people and veterans, the history of the oil industry's development, reviews of published books, material from the journal archive, and information. Sample articles from its online archive show the range in practice, from mathematical methods in budgetary price-setting during well construction to the physical and mathematical definition of Absheron ground oil pollution parameters, the latter addressing the 7,886 hectares of oilfield territory reported as impregnated by oil and pollution in Azerbaijan. Ecology's presence among the sections is significant: the journal's own editorial commentary has called ecological problems the top priority for the petroleum industry, pointing to the Absheron peninsula as visible evidence, and has announced plans for an electronic archive of papers published across the journal's whole history since 1920 and for brief English-version issues and special news bulletins.

SOCAR, distribution and the modern journal

Today's founder and publisher is SOCAR, the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan Republic, and the journal is printed at the centralised printing house of SOCAR's Oil and Gas Research Project Institute, in a 60 by 84 format, monthly, with a circulation of 1,000 to 1,200 copies. It is distributed to all SOCAR enterprises and organisations, to scientific-research and design institutes, higher schools, joint-stock enterprises and foreign companies and corporations, and abroad by subscription and the internet, with articles published in Azerbaijani, Russian and English. That trilingual practice continues the journal's historic position between languages: Russian was its original language and remains a working language of Caspian engineering, Azerbaijani is the state language of its home industry, and English is the language of the international companies that have operated in the Caspian since the 1990s. Its modest print circulation should be read correctly. This is a specialist journal whose value lies in its readership of engineers, geologists, managers and researchers and in the permanence of its archive, not in mass reach. SOCAR also publishes the separate SOCAR Proceedings journal, with its own sections in geology, drilling and reservoir engineering; Azerbaijan Oil Industry is the older, broader title, carrying production practice, economics, ecology and industry history as well as research.

Legacy as an industry encyclopedia

The journal's own description of itself as a specific industry encyclopedia is, for once, a publisher's claim that the record supports. A periodical that began by publishing the Baku conventions' petroleum statistics before 1900, recorded the Nobel prizes of the boom era, closed and revived through revolution, argued the first theory of Caspian offshore development in 1934, and still publishes monthly on geology, drilling, refining, automation and ecology has few parallels in industrial publishing anywhere. Its run constitutes a continuous technical literature for the Azerbaijani oil industry across the imperial, Soviet and independent periods, written largely by the people who built that industry. For researchers, its back files offer something no retrospective history can: the industry's own contemporary account of its problems, from Absheron soil pollution to offshore construction, in the order in which those problems appeared. Readers should approach it as an official SOCAR publication, with the perspective that implies, and should note that the full electronic archive the journal announced remains the key to its wider use. As a magazine in the WorldNM directory it is classified with Azerbaijan's magazines, but in substance Azerbaijan Oil Industry is what it has been since 1899: the trade and science journal of record of Baku oil.