A crude oil leak in the Ecuadorian Amazon has contaminated a river in the province of Sucumbios (northeast, bordering Colombia), the Ministry of the Environment said Friday, without specifying the quantity of oil spilled.
The emergency, which occurred on September 25 and was only reported today, “reached the Teteye River” in the town of Lago Agrio (capital of Sucumbios), the ministry said in a statement.
The department does not specify the extent of environmental damage or leakage, but says cleanup work has progressed by 94%. “Currently, crude recovery and cleanup activities are being conducted in the area.”
The national company Petroecuador said in a statement that the leak was caused by a “suspected sabotage” against the pipeline of the well Lago 032. His staff continues to “clean up the banks of the Teteye River and its tributaries to mitigate the damage”. The company does not give
itself no information on the extent of the damage.
Last February, a rupture in the pipeline of the private company Oleoducto de Crudos Pesados (OCP) led to the spilling of some 6,300 barrels of oil in the Cayambe-Coca National Park in the Amazon, which is home to a variety of wildlife and vast water reserves. The Quijos and Coca rivers had
were affected by pollution.
The Coca River had already been contaminated by another spill in 2020, with a leak of nearly 15,000 barrels of oil, according to official figures.
Two pipelines transport Ecuadorian crude oil from the Amazonian oil fields in the northeast of the country to the ports of the province of Esmeraldas (northwest), bordering Colombia on the Pacific coast: a public pipeline (SOTE), at a rate of 360,000 barrels/day, and the private pipeline operated by OCP (160,000 barrels/day).
Ecuador has significant oil resources, its main export, concentrated mainly in its Amazon forests.
Between January and November 2021, the country produced an average of 494,000 barrels/day.
Between 1960 and 1990, Texaco, a subsidiary of Chevron, had exploited these oil reserves in the Amazon forest and was accused of having destroyed part of the forest and deliberately dumped millions of tons of toxic waste in the middle of the jungle or in the rivers, on several hundred sites.
