Oil Rocks

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Soviet 1971 stamp, featuring Oil Rocks.

The Oil Rocks, called Neft Daşları in the Azerbaijani language, was the first oil platform in the world. It was built in 1947 as an exercise of Soviet and Azeri ambition. The Oil Rocks lies 45-50 km offshore on the Caspian Sea and extracts oil from the shallow water portion of the Absheron geological trend. The most distinctive feature of the Oil Rocks is that it is actually a functional city with a population of about 5,000 and over 200 km of streets built on piles of dirt and landfill. Most of the inhabitants work on shifts; a week on Oil Rocks followed by a week on the shore. The small city includes shops, school and a library. After almost 60 years the Oil Rocks is still quite unusual as the world's first and largest oil platform.

The facility is poorly maintained, with miles of roads now submerged beneath the sea. Around some worker's dormitories, the waterline now stands at the second-floor windows. Although a full one-third of the Oil Rocks complex's 600 wells are inoperative or inaccessible, operations have continued without a significant increase in investment. The site, despite its imperfections, still produces over half of the total crude oil output of Azerbaijan. The government has striven to attract foreign investment into Oil Rocks, resulting in several new additions being grafted onto the existing structure.

Several action sequences in the 1999 James Bond film The World Is Not Enough are set on the Oil Rocks.