Ecuador: Oil leak in a major tributary of the Amazon

An oil leak of still undetermined scale has contaminated the Napo River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon in northeastern Ecuador, affecting local communities, the national oil company Petroecuador said on Thursday.

The incident was caused by a ruptured oil pipeline in Block 16, located in the Amazonian province of Orellana, according to Petroecuador. Subsequently, there was “heavy rain in the area, which caused some of the hydrocarbons retained by barriers (installed urgently) to flow into the Napo River,” the state-owned company explained.

These barriers had been installed preventively to “protect the bodies of water bordering the Napo River”. “Additional dams are currently being placed to prevent the advance of traces of hydrocarbons in the rivers and thus minimize the impact of the rains,” added Petroecuador who claims, without giving further details, to be in direct communication with the affected communities.

“Environmental disaster”

Crossing Peru and Ecuador, the Napo River is one of the main tributaries of the Amazon in this part of Latin America. “New environmental disaster caused by hydrocarbons in the #RioNapo,” commented Ecuadorian lawyer Pablo Fajardo on the X network, who has been fighting for years against the pollution generated by oil activity in this Amazonian part of Ecuador

“Residents of the communities of the parish #Pañacocha, (in the neighboring province of) Sucumbios denounce this,” he added, supporting a video showing a river with oily stains on its surface.

Asked by AFP, Pablo Fajardo specified that this video had been sent by a local indigenous Quichua community, and that a team of volunteers would go to the site on Friday at dawn to assess the extent of the damage.

475,000 barrels per day

Ecuador has significant oil resources, its main export product, concentrated mainly in its Amazonian forests. In 2023, the country will extract 475,000 barrels per day (bpd). Between January and April 2024, the country extracted 485,000 b/d, of which 73% was sold abroad.

Accidental pipeline leaks are recurrent in these oil zones, but it is very difficult to know precisely the quantities of crude thus spilled into nature.

In February 2022, the rupture of an oil pipeline caused the spill of 6,300 barrels in the protected Cayambe-Coca National Park, which is home to a wide variety of wildlife and a water reserve. The Quijos and Coca rivers were affected. The latter was the scene of another spill in 2020, when 15,000 barrels contaminated this watercourse.

Ecological scandal

Two pipelines, one public, the other private, transport Ecuadorian crude from the oil fields in the northeast of the country to ports in the province of Esmeraldas (northwest), on the Pacific coast. The northeast Amazon was the scene of one of the biggest ecological scandals of the end of the 20th century, involving the American oil company Texaco, which became Chevron since 2011.

In 30 years of activity since 1967, the company has dug 356 wells and nearly a thousand retention basins collecting oil residues, toxic waste and contaminated water. These “pools”, scattered throughout the forest, have caused a major ecological disaster, often cited as one of the worst oil disasters in history.

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