At a crossroads Baku to step away.from oil legacy as it prepares for Cop29

Oil is inescapable in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan.

- Fiona Harvey

The smell of it greets visitors on arrival, and from the shores of the Caspian Sea on which the city is built the tankers are eternally visible. Flares from refineries light up the night sky, and you do not have to travel far to see fields of "nodding donkeys", small piston pump oil wells about 6 metres tall, that look almost festive in their bright red and green livery.

It will be an interesting setting, in a few months' time, for the gathering of the 29th UN climate conference of the parties.

Mukhtar Babayev, Azerbaijan's minister of ecology who will chair the two-week summit, likes to position the country at the crossroads of the world. He says it can provide a bridge between the wealthy global north and the poor global south; as a former Soviet bloc country, between east and west; and between its fellow oil and gas producers, and the countries that provide its export market.

Azerbaijan is where the world's first oil wells were dug in the 1840s, more than a decade before the US dug its first well. It is one of the most fossil fuel dependent economies in the world: oil and gas make up 90% of its exports, and provide 60% of the government's budget.

This brought riches. "Oil and, more recently, gas have been largely responsible for the remarkable rise in living standards in Azerbaijan since the late 1990s," according to the International Energy Agency.

But the country is moving to renewable energy, with plans to expand wind and solar energy. An interconnector is planned, to bring this low-carbon power to eastern Europe, under the Black Sea to Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania.

"Azerbaijan would like to share our experience," Babayev said. "We would like to invite all the countries, especially the fossil fuel producing countries, to be together in this process. Because we understand our responsibility. We think that we can do more, and together."