We were sitting at our usual spot along the Bosphorus last weekend, tulip shaped glasses of tea warming our hands, when a massive oil tanker drifted slowly across the horizon. I pointed to it and told my colleagues: that ship might be carrying oil from Tengiz the vast field on Kazakhstan's Caspian shore where I worked as a planning engineer from 2007. A distant freight train echoed across the water. That too, I said, could be hauling machinery bound for those same oil fields, three thousand kilometres away.
