There’s a mind-bending Soviet-era oil rig city ‘floating’ on the planet’s largest lake

When filmmaker Marc Wolfensberger first found out about Neft Daşları, he thought it was a myth. He kept hearing about this secretive city, sprawled like floating, rusting tentacles across the Caspian Sea, far from the nearest shoreline. But very few had ever seen it, he said. “The degree of mystery was enormously high.”

It wasn’t until he saw it with his own eyes, when he managed to travel there on a water delivery ship in the late 1990s, that he knew it was real. It “was beyond anything I had seen before,” he told CNN. Guarded by military vessels, it was like “a motorway in the middle of the sea,” he said, stretching out “like an octopus.”

Desperate to document this mind-boggling city, he spent eight years convincing Azerbaijan’s government to let him return, which he finally did in 2008, spending two weeks there to make his film, “Oil Rocks: City Above the Sea.”

Neft Daşları, which translates to “Oil Rocks,” is a tangle of oil wells and production sites connected by miles of bridges in the vastness of the Caspian Sea, the world’s largest lake. It’s around 60 miles off the coast of Azerbaijan’s capital city of Baku and a six-hour boat ride from the mainland.

It is the world’s oldest offshore oil platform, according to the Guinness Book of records, and at its peak, bustled with more than 5,000 inhabitants.

In recent decades, however, its population has dwindled, while sections have fallen into disrepair and been claimed by the sea. Yet it’s still operational, a symbol of Azerbaijan’s long oil-drenched history in the Caspian, a vast body of water rich in planet-heating fossil fuels that’s also dramatically shrinking due to the climate crisis those fossil fuels are driving.

The history of Oil Rocks dates to the Soviet era. In the late 1940s, oil workers landed on a tiny island and built a drilling rig and a small house for accommodation. The first exploratory well was drilled in 1949, sending up a fountain of “black gold.”

The oil field sent its first tanker of oil back to shore in 1951 and construction began in earnest on the city. What came next was an architectural and technical miracle, Wolfensberger said.

The city slowly grew outward, held up by metal poles sunk into the seabed and perched several feet above sea level as if floating. It was eventually made up of nearly 2,000 wells and around 320 production sites, connected by more than 100 miles of bridges, and over 60 miles of oil and gas pipelines.

Seven decommissioned ships were brought out to the area and deliberately sunk. Their carcasses formed an artificial bay to protect the city from wind and waves — although Neft Daşları has remained vulnerable to storms and rough water.

“Some of those ships are visible on the surface of the water where they were buried,” said Mirvari Gahramanli, head of the Oil-Workers Rights Protection Organization, which focuses on human rights in Azerbaijan’s oil and gas sector.

Over the next decades, Neft Daşları gained accommodation blocks for workers, a bakery, a theater able to seat hundreds, shops, medical facilities, a soccer pitch and a heliport. There are even trees and a park planted on the steel structures.

Some in Azerbaijan call it “the eighth wonder of the world,” Gahramanli said. Others call it “the island of seven ships,” after the sunken vessels that surround it.

It was a jewel in the crown of Caspian oil production and has produced nearly 180 million tons of oil in its 75-year lifespan, according to Azerbaijan’s state-run oil company SOCAR, which owns and operates Neft Daşları. At its height in 1967, it pumped out a record 7.6 million tons.

But its importance has dwindled over the past decades as bigger oil fields opened up and oil prices fluctuated. Production levels have shrunk to less than 3,000 tons a day (approximately 1 million tons a year), according to SOCAR figures from January.

“The production at Neft Daşları supplies only a minor part of Azerbaijan’s oil production, much of which is supplied to the domestic market,” said Brenda Shaffer, an energy expert at the US Naval Postgraduate School, who has advised oil and gas companies in the Caspian region.

As oil production has decreased, the city’s population has shrunk to about 3,000, Gahramanli said, with workers usually doing 15-day shifts at sea then 15 days at home on the mainland.

Vulnerable to the brackish, stormy water of the Caspian, parts of the city are crumbling. Even back in 2008, big chunks of bridges had collapsed, Wolfensberger said. There was “still a lot of life, but with many things falling apart at the same time.”

There have also been reports of oil spills. Gahramanli’s organization has been raising concerns about pollution from Neft Daşları for years, including reports of untreated wastewater being pumped into the Caspian Sea.

SOCAR had not replied to CNN’s questions at the time of publishing, but in a 2019 Facebook post, the company said it had identified workers who had discharged oil into the sea. “SOCAR will take appropriate administrative measures on employees who pollute the environment,” the post said.

Gahramanli said the situation has improved in the run-up to COP29, the United Nations-backed climate conference taking place in Baku next week. Global leaders will gather to discuss tackling the climate crisis, driven by humans burning fossil fuels, in conference rooms only a few dozen miles away from Neft Daşları.

Questions have long been asked about what will happen to this enormous watery city when its oil runs dry.

At the end of his documentary, Wolfensberger sets out the difficult decisions he sees facing authorities: dismantle the city at enormous cost, turn it into a vacation resort or simply abandon it, “paving the way for a major ecological disaster.”

Some think it will be repurposed. “After its oil supplies run out, Neft Daşları will probably become a tourism magnet,” Shaffer said. Wolfensberger believes it could become a museum. “It’s really the cradle of offshore oil exploration,” he said. “It’s part of the heritage.”

But for now, the city remains, still producing oil, still all but sealed off from outsiders, a rusty patchwork symbol of an industry in slow decline.