Petroleum.Area Albania.

After midnight, only the candescent blue and green pumps of GAS AFT break the darkness along the SH95, one of the main arteries of the city. The gas stations of the county of Fier never close. They never go dark. They are the only thing in this corner of Albania that keeps working without interruption, regardless of the storm that has left half the city without power.

The pumps fill cars at three in the morning. Stray dogs cross the desolate road alongside men who walk in no particular direction, victims of insomnia they would attribute, if pressed, to the smell. The smell of oil in this small county has become so unbearable that it hardly allows sleep to set in at night. It permeates every experience, taints every memory, always reminds of its presence.

"They take advantage of when it is dark to go down to the river and dump whatever is left over," says the owner of the Prince Hotel. He does not name a company. He no longer needs to. Headaches and migraines have become routine for the residents of Fier. So has buying bottled water, because the tap water is no longer safe to drink.

The county of Fier and the practically abandoned oil refinery on its periphery are only one link in a longer chain. The chain begins ten kilometres east, in Patos-Marinëz: a vast region under whose soil sit, according to official estimates, 5.3 billion barrels of crude.

Dictator Enver Hoxha and his regime were aware of what lay beneath the land. In the middle of the Cold War, he recruited the resources of the Soviet Union and the Chinese People's Republic to start drilling. A state company was created — Albpetrol — to extract the country's oil from beneath the surface. In a few years, the undulating fields across the counties of Fier and Patos were littered with oil wells built quickly and with little planning.

Massive refineries went up next to towns like Ballsh, where the residents saw their villages turn into small cities to house the influx of Chinese workers coming to work at the plant. The refinery became the sole motor of employment for the people who lived around it. Thousands performed difficult labour in conditions they would not have the opportunity to fight to improve.

Foreign interest in Albania's oil reserves took root after the fall of the dictatorship, when the country gradually opened itself to a market economy. Like many countries in the former orbit of the Soviet Union, Albania's nationalised companies underwent a process of privatisation in which much of the wealth was handed to those closest to power.

There is, however, a catch. The crude under Patos-Marinëz is, in the words of Mariano Marzo, professor of stratigraphy at the University of Barcelona, of low quality and unfavourable composition. Transnational oil corporations do not operate in the country. Most of what Albania extracts is exported to Italy, Spain, and Malta, where it is refined, and then sold back to Albania for consumption.

Routine negligence and widespread corruption led Albpetrol to bankruptcy. The company's extraction technology remained unchanged since the sixties. Most wells are out of service. Those that remain active yield half of what they were designed to produce. Oil leaks from dilapidated wells form dark pools of sludge. Cows graze around the leaky pipes. Sheep feed on the grass that grows atop the blackened soil. Half the population of the region works in agriculture.

In 2006, Albpetrol sold part of its production to Bankers Petroleum, a Canadian company that is now partly Chinese-owned. Bankers invested in the modernisation of existing infrastructure and began to implement basic environmental and safety standards. Over the years it acquired more territory; today it runs 95 percent of crude extraction in the country.

Reis runs a small corner shop in Ballsh that has allowed him to break free from the industrial sphere controlling the town's economy. "Foreign companies buy the refinery, use it until they are done with it, and then they leave," he says. "They don't invest in improving the facilities, and they work at night, so we can't see what is going on. Now, nobody knows who owns the refinery."

He is not exaggerating for effect. The mayor of Ballsh, Agron Kapllanaj, cannot confirm who currently owns the refinery. Neither can the vice mayor, Hajredin Serjanaj. The only current employees of the refinery are the security guards who watch over a yellow mountain of sulphur in the middle of a deserted industrial facility.

The modernisation that Bankers Petroleum brought to Albania's oil infrastructure introduced new extraction techniques. The most consequential of them was fracking: a pressurised chemical mixture injected into a perforation in the ground to fracture the rocky substrate and release the gas and oil contained within.

In the Zharrëz region, the consequences were measurable. Between 2013 and 2017, an uptick in seismic activity destroyed 71 houses and damaged 540 more. Dozens of families have left.

Vasil Koço, a retired resident of Zharrëz, abandoned his house two years ago when cracks in the walls began rapidly multiplying. He now rents an apartment in Fier and does not plan to return. He is afraid the house will collapse. Bankers Petroleum made a donation toward rebuilding some of the lost homes. The company has not, to this day, assumed responsibility for their destruction.