Ecuador has started drilling for oil on the edge of a controversial block of pristine rainforest inhabited by two of the last tribes in the world living in voluntary isolation.
The well platform known as Tiputini C, which is now operational a few kilometers from the Peruvian border in the Yasuni National Park, is expected to be the first of nearly 200 wells needed to extract the 920 million barrels of crude oil thought to lie below the Ishpingo Tambococha Tiputini (ITT) block.
The Tiputini field is just outside the ITT zone, which the government has ordered oil companies to leave untouched. However, Aborigines, rainforest campaigners and many Ecuadoreans this week said that they expect oil exploitation in Yasuni National Park to lead to pollution, forest destruction and the decimation of the nomadic Tagaeri and Taromenane tribes, who have chosen to have no contact with the outside world.
Ecuador’s Coordinating Ministry of Strategic Sectors said that the state oil company, PetroAmazonas, would be using directional and horizontal drilling that would meet high international standards.
The first oil is expected to flow by the end of this year.
“We are optimizing costs and increasing production areas with better prospects,” Ecuadoran Coordinating Minister of Strategic Resources Rafael Poveda said.
Ecuador’s decision to allow oil companies to drill the ITT block, which contains about 30 percent of the country’s remaining reserves, has been hotly disputed since 2007 when the new government of Ecuadoran President Rafael Correa pledged to permanently keep the oil underground in exchange for about US$3.6 billion from the international community.
The “Yasuni initiative” was administered by the UN and hailed as one of the world’s most innovative conservation proposals.
However, in August 2013, Correa withdrew the proposal saying the pledges received from countries were minimal and that Ecuador had been failed by the international community.
He argued that Ecuador, which was devastated by oil pollution in the 1970s by US oil firms, had no option, but to exploit the ITT oil to pay for poverty relief.
Correa’s change of mind led to demonstrations, the emergence of a political movement known as Yasunidos and a hotly-debated petition which failed to reach the threshold to trigger a national referendum.
Ecuador is the first country in the world to include the rights of nature in its constitution and until the Yasuni controversy it was considered one of the most environmentally progressive countries. To reduce criticism, Correa promised that only 0.0001 percent of the area of the Yasuni park would be exploited and the best available technology would be used to reduce pollution.
However, many Aboriginal leaders and conservationists remain angry.
“By drilling Yasun ITT, the Ecuadorian government is threatening to destroy one of the most biodiverse and culturally fragile treasures on the planet for what amounts to about a week of global oil supply,” Amazon Watch director Leila Salazar-Lopez said. “Why such urgency to exploit the Yasuni ITT with an adverse oil market?”
Waorani people in Ecuador vice-president Alicia Cahuiya — who has received death threats for opposing oil exploitation in Yasuni — said Ecuador was not protecting isolated peoples.
“If they are going to protect them, they can no longer construct more roads or oil wells. The state must, as they say, ensure and protect the Taromenane. As Waorani, we ask that they keep their territory. No more exploitation there. No more taking down our trees,” she said.
Because it is right on the equator at the junction of the forest and the mountains, Yasun is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth. The park is thought to have more species of plants, animals and insects per hectare than anywhere else.
Kelly Swing, director of the Tiputini Biodiversity Station on the edge of the Yasuni park, said drilling made no sense.
“As a new wave of oil operations push into the last remaining corners of the Yasuni, we are appalled,” she said. “Ecuador is now losing around US$15 per barrel, but continues to expand [oil] operations under the pretext that prices are about to soar again while countries like Iran are flooding the world market with more product every day.”
In a separate development, Ecuador’s government earlier this year sold oil exploration rights on 202,343 hectares of forest adjoining the Yasuni park to a consortium of Chinese state-owned oil companies.
Andes Petroleum Ecuador paid about US$80 million, according to the research firm Energy Intelligence.
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