Brazilian authorities said on Monday they were slapping a US$17.5 million fine on US oil firm Chevron in connection with a major spill off Rio de Janeiro state last year.
Magda Chambriard, director general of the National Petroleum Agency (ANP), told a press conference that the new fine covered 24 infractions.
“There is one [missing fine] related to the abandonment of the well. The maximum limit is 1 million reais under the law,” Chambriard said, adding that it would be imposed “in the next two months.”
Chevron could be hit with an additional fine of US$50,000 for “other items.”
Brazil’s national oil regulator estimated that 2,400 barrels of crude were spilled in the November accident.
A report by ANP released in July accused Chevron of negligence and said the company could have avoided the spill, which occurred in the Frade field, located 370km northwest of Rio.
Last month, a Brazilian court ordered Chevron and its driller Transocean to stop their oil drilling and shipping activities within 30 days.
Chambriard said ANP would turn to the Supreme Court after a lower court rejected its earlier appeal to overturn the suspension of Chevron’s operations, the state Agencia Brasil reported. ANP wants the suspension lifted “so as not to hurt oil production in Brazil,” the agency said. Brazil’s state-owned oil giant Petrobras needs Chevron’s assistance for its own operations.
Last year, the Brazilian environment institute Ibama already imposed two fines worth a total of US$33.4 million on Chevron for environmental damage and failings in its emergency plan during the accident.
Chevron has a small operation in the Frade field, producing only 60,000 barrels a day, but that is important to ensure that Brazil meet its target of a production of 2 million barrels a day.
The resource-rich country hopes to double output to 4.2 million barrels a day in 2020.
Meanwhile, Transocean is still operating in Brazil, but is under court order to stop doing so in the middle of next month. A suspension would also affect Petrobras, which has contracted eight rigs from Transocean.
Earlier this month, a court official said the head of Chevron’s Brazil unit would be allowed to leave the country after posting bail of US$245,000 in connection with the November spill.
The official said judge Marcelo Luzio Marques Araujo set the bail amount to make sure George Buck returns to Brazil to stand trial “each time he is summoned.”
Brazilian authorities had confiscated the passports of Buck and 16 other people linked to Chevron and Transocean following the November spill.
State prosecutors had filed legal action against Chevron and Transocean over the November incident, seeking US$11 billion for what they have called “immeasurable” environmental damage.
Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) is to visit Russia next month for a summit of the BRICS bloc of developing economies, Chinese Minister of Foreign Affairs Wang Yi (王毅) said on Thursday, a move that comes as Moscow and Beijing seek to counter the West’s global influence. Xi’s visit to Russia would be his second since the Kremlin sent troops into Ukraine in February 2022. China claims to take a neutral position in the conflict, but it has backed the Kremlin’s contentions that Russia’s action was provoked by the West, and it continues to supply key components needed by Moscow for
Japan scrambled fighter jets after Russian aircraft flew around the archipelago for the first time in five years, Tokyo said yesterday. From Thursday morning to afternoon, the Russian Tu-142 aircraft flew from the sea between Japan and South Korea toward the southern Okinawa region, the Japanese Ministry of Defense said in a statement. They then traveled north over the Pacific Ocean and finished their journey off the northern island of Hokkaido, it added. The planes did not enter Japanese airspace, but flew over an area subject to a territorial dispute between Japan and Russia, a ministry official said. “In response, we mobilized Air Self-Defense
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema