The difficult operating conditions of the Transcaucasian Railway through the Surami Pass and railway’s limited capacity likewise prompted oil industrialists to look for other means of transporting their products. In 1893, nearly 11 million barrels of kerosene were stockpiled in Baku, waiting to be transported. In October 1895, the railroad track and several bridges on the Transcaucasian Railway were damaged by the flooding of the Kura River. Shipments of petroleum products were stopped for two months, resulting in large losses for oil industrialists.
Oil entrepreneurs, along with support from the scientific and engineering community, made numerous appeals to the Russian government regarding the need for an alternative to rail transport. They argued that pumping crude oil to Batumi and refining it there would promote “deeper” use of this raw material, i.e., production not only of more kerosene and residual oil, but also mineral oil and other valuable products. Their appeals were taken into consideration and on May 23, 1896, the Russian Imperial State Council decided to build a trunk kerosene pipeline from Baku to Batumi, to pass along the existing railroad route.
Playing an important role in this was the eminent Russian political figure Sergey Witte (1849–1915), minister of finance, who had earlier occupied the post of minister of railroads. Witte was a firm supporter of developing the domestic oil industry in every possible way. For example, the “Instructions on Producing an Attestation of the Testing of Oil and Refined Petroleum Products,” approved by him on February 6, 1896, did much to improve the quality of domestic petroleum products and make them more competitive on the world market.
Management of the design and construction of the Baku–Batumi kerosene pipeline was assigned to the Engineering Council of the Ministry of Railroads, with design development headed by Nikolay Shchukin (1848–1924), professor at the St. Petersburg Technological Institute.
Before work began on the pipeline, the Russian Ministry of Railroads first sent him and production engineer L. Wartenburg to the US in the summer of 1896 to familiarize themselves with the state of American pipeline transportation and the various techniques for building oil pipelines.
After Shchukin and Wartenburg returned to Russia, they began to develop the design for the Baku–Batumi kerosene pipeline. At the time, nobody knew how to construct a kerosene pipeline of such significant length (more than 545 miles), much less how to construct one along a railroad route. After all, kerosene is very prone to leakage and evaporation, which makes it challenging, and dangerous, to pump, especially near passenger railcars and petroleum product tank cars, not to mention in the vicinity of numerous tunnels, bridges, and other railroad structures.
One of the most complex parts of the project was the design of the first section of the kerosene pipeline from Mikhaylovo to Batumi, on the western mountain segment of the route, which was the most difficult for transporting tank cars with petroleum products.
Nevertheless, Nikolay Shchukin was able to develop a very careful hydraulic calculation for the pipeline, as well as instructions that set forth very strict requirements regarding the quality of the pipes and their junctions.
The design was discussed by many major scholars of mechanics and hydrodynamics, members of the Engineering Council, and invited specialists. These included the engineer Nikolay Sytenko, who authored a book about calculating the strength of bridges and viaducts; transportation engineer Genrikh Merching, who wrote a book about the movement of kerosene and oil through pipes; Aleksandr Bari, who was head of the engineering company Engineer A. V. Bari Construction Office; Mikhail Lazarev, representing the Congress of Oil Industrialists in St. Petersburg; and many others.
The government decided that the pipes would be fabricated only at Russian plants located in Mariupol, Sosnovitsy, and Yekaterinoslavl. Pipes having a minimum length of 15 feet were accepted from the plants. At their ends, they had a V-thread that tapered toward the end. This type of thread, which assures sealing of pipe junctions, was borrowed from American analogs. Steel flange joints were also provided for a series of pipeline sections.
Preliminary work on building the first section of the kerosene pipeline—from Mikhaylovo to Batumi (141 miles)—began in September 1896. Drawings of the railroad route and bridges indicating pipe placement were carefully prepared, and designs for the boiler and pumping stations were completed. In the summer of 1898, pipes began to arrive along the route and the pace of work significantly accelerated. Whereas only 27 miles of pipe had been laid from September 1898 to February 1899, by June 1899, 89 miles had been laid. Over 31 miles of this route, pipes had been screwed together and lowered into the ground, while over the remaining 58-mile section, they had been screwed together and left on the surface. By July of the same year, earth-moving work had ended, and the construction of boiler stations and buildings for service personnel had been completed. In November, the last batch of pipes was received.
Pumps for the pumping stations were provided by the Worthington Company (US). They were piston-operated, direct-acting pumps with a compound-type steam engine having valve steam distribution and double steam expansion. Two 110-kilowatt operating pumps and one backup pump were installed at every Mikhaylovo–Batumi kerosene pipeline station. In addition, tanks holding 8,125 tons of kerosene each were installed at the Samtredi and Kobuleti stations. A 1,080-ton tank was built for unloading kerosene from the tank cars at the Mikhaylovo station, along with a 10,800-ton storage tank; and a 15,300-ton tank was built at Batumi.
To avoid large kerosene leaks in case of an accident, the pipeline was outfitted with check valves every one to two miles along the pipeline. If the pipeline pressure dropped by 15%, an automatic device shut off the pumps.
March 14, 1900 is a special date in the history of the Russian oil industry. On that date, the first (and most important) section of the Russian Baku–Batumi trunk kerosene pipeline was completed, after a construction period of more than three years. A ceremony was held at Mikhaylovo Station on July 15, 1900 to celebrate the commissioning of this kerosene pipeline section. The ceremony was attended by Infantry General Grigory Golitsyn, head commander of civilian affairs in the Caucasus; Colonel Ivan Svechin, governor of Tiflis; Ludwig Perschke, director of the Excise Tax Administration of the Transcaucasus; transportation engineer Yevgeny Vedeneyev, head of the Transcaucasian Railway and kerosene pipeline construction manager, and other officials.
On June 12, 1901, Emperor Nicholas II approved the decision to completely finish construction of the Baku–Batumi kerosene pipeline. On June 16, 1901, the Ministry of Railroads decided to build the next section of the kerosene pipeline from the Ag-Taglya station (13 miles from Tiflis in the direction toward Baku) to the Mikhaylovo station, a distance of 87 miles. Directed by transportation engineer Aleksandr Dombrovsky, the construction work was finished within three years, and on December 30, 1904, this section of the kerosene pipeline was put into operation.
Construction of the final and longest (319 miles) section of the kerosene pipeline, between Baku and Ag-Taglya, was directed by the engineer A. Pavlichinsky. Here, the extensive experience acquired over the past seven years of construction was put to full use. Most of the equipment installed at pumping stations in this section of the kerosene pipeline was produced by Russian companies. A 110-kilowatt two-cylinder diesel engine was set up at each of the four kerosene pipeline stations located in areas without water. Operating the pumps with diesel engines turned out to be much less expensive than using steam engines, since the efficiency of the former was 28%, whereas the latter only had an efficiency of 10%.