Ecuador will say yes or no this Sunday to the exploitation of oil in the Amazon

the future of Petroleum in Ecuador is being played in an unprecedented and historic national plebiscite that will decide this Sunday whether to stop exploiting one of its main oil deposits, in a vote where environmentalists want to give the world an example of protecting the amazon through the popular vote and the oil tankers avoid a torpedo to the waterline of the Ecuadorian economy.

It is an unprecedented case that a country places in the hands of the population whether or not to continue with the exploitation of crude oil in an area, at a contradictory moment on the international scene, where all directions point towards the energy transition while the Global demand for oil is still on the rise.

Thus, this vote, to which more than 13.4 million Ecuadorians are called, can set a world precedent and, if it has a successful result, can encourage environmental groups in Ecuador to promote new consultations on other oil fields, an industry that is one of the main pillars of the national economy, representing about a tenth of the gross domestic product (GDP).

The object of this consultation is the Block 43-ITTone of the four deposits that are exploited within the Yasuni National Parka natural reserve that is considered the heart of the Ecuadorian Amazon and a global epicenter of biodiversity.

It also seeks the protection of tagaeri, taromenane and dugakaeri, three family clans of indigenous people in voluntary isolation who live within the Yasuní and whose intangible zone borders the Block 43-ITTwhich since 2016 has been operated by the state-owned company Petroecuador.

The company’s plans are to make new perforations in the south of the deposit, specifically in the Ishpingo field, the closest to the intangible zone through which these nomadic native peoples move.

TEN YEARS OF WAITING

He plebiscite It was promoted by the environmental group Yasunidos, which managed to carry out the national consultation after gathering 757,000 signatures and winning a legal battle that lasted ten years against the electoral bodies of Ecuador.

They focused solely on Block 43-ITT, the most recent to enter into operation and the most productive, although within Yasuní oil has been exploited since the 1980s in Blocks 16, 31 and 67, which are not affected by this plebiscite.

Some 55,000 barrels of oil leave daily from Block 43-ITT, which represents around 11% of national production, which is around 480,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

Since operations began in 2016, there have been no official reports of oil spills into the environment, nor has the company recorded contacts with indigenous people in voluntary isolation.

Petroecuador has always maintained that the development of Block 43-ITT It has been done with the highest standards so that the environmental impact is minimal, so that the facilities occupy only 80 hectares of the million that the Yasuni National Park.

This is especially true when applying cluster drilling, which allows dozens of wells to emerge from the same platform in multiple directions without having to have hundreds of platforms with a vertical well each.

MILLIONAIRE COST

There are large differences between the economic damage that the cessation of the Block 43-ITT.

For the goverment, the State would stop obtaining 1,200 million dollars in benefits per year and calculates that it would be 13,800 million dollars in the next twenty years, while it estimates an expense of 500 million dollars to dismantle facilities that cost close to 2,000 million dollars.

Environmentalists claim that the profit from the operation of the Block 43-ITT it is much lower and they even think that the cost of production is not going to make it profitable as the international price of a barrel of oil goes down, so they propose to compensate it with a tax on wealth.

Along with the Yasuní consultation, another will be held in Quito promoted by the Quito Sin Minería collective, which seeks to prohibit mining exploitation in the Chocó Andino, a space declared a biosphere reserve by Unesco, covering 287,000 hectares, of which that 124,000 are in the Commonwealth of Chocó Andino, which is part of the metropolitan area of ​​the Ecuadorian capital.

Ecologists maintain that mining will harm the environment, something that the Chamber of Mining denies by stating that, if the concessions that are in the exploration phase and others in the award process were to be exploited, the activity would be concentrated only in 0, 4% of the Andean Chocó.

(With information from EFE)