Once again, the beaches of Puerto Cabello have been dyed black and the waves began to bring dead fish to the coast covered in tar. A huge spill from the oil industry once again destroys the Venezuelan coast. An oxidation lagoon for tarry crude oil waste began to overflow last Tuesday from the PDVSA facilities in El Palito, one of the most important in the country, located in the Carabobo State of the central region. A day after environmental organizations raised the alarm, the state oil company has not reported on the situation, but commissions of workers, volunteers and fishermen began to be deployed to begin the cleanup. In the videos you can see rows of men in white panties trying to remove crude oil from a completely stained sea with buckets.
About 200 fishing families live in the area. Local media have reported that the hydrocarbon spill reaches about five kilometers out to sea. Biologists and environmentalists, on social networks, have calculated the affected area with satellite images at 11 square kilometers, equivalent to 1,500 soccer fields. To date, it is unknown how much oil has spilled into the Caribbean Sea. Three years ago, a spill of 25 thousand barrels of oil in this same area, also from a waste lagoon, reached the Morrocoy National Park, a mangrove reserve and refuge for protected birds. So, in the midst of a brutal nationwide fuel shortage, the gasoline plant was trying to double its production.
PDVSA's oil production remains stagnant at around 700 thousand barrels per day. Expectations of increase after the six-month relaxation of sectoral sanctions, agreed a month ago between the United States and the Government of Nicolás Maduro in exchange for democratic guarantees, have a low ceiling due to the precarious state of the main manufacturing industry. South American country. Decades of mismanagement, politicization, lack of maintenance and voracious corruption led the company that was once a model in Latin America to its worst state. But the plummeting income from oil sales due to sanctions did not stop the serious administration problems either. At the beginning of 2023, a purge broke out that ended with the resignation of the Minister of Petroleum and senior government official, Tareck El Aissami, whose whereabouts are unknown today, and took several officials from the state company and related organizations to prison. The Public Ministry revealed an embezzlement of more than 23 billion dollars in a corruption scheme called by the authorities PDVSA Cripto.
The Civil Association Gente del Petróleo, made up of former PDVSA workers, has recorded 17 spills of this type in 2023. “These are events that reveal the lack of prevention, supervision and maintenance policies and plans backed by the minimum safety, hygiene and environment,” said the organization. Throughout 2022, seven oil spills occurred per month, according to monitoring by the Political Ecology Observatory, a year in which significant fires also occurred at oil facilities. This new spill has been described as an “environmental disaster” by the area's NGO.
PDVSA's environmental liability is large. This year the protagonists were the repeated complaints of contamination of Lake Maracaibo, the largest in South America crossed by kilometers of pipes full of leaks through which the diminished oil production goes. A photograph from the European Space Agency of the estuary completely green due to pollution went viral and ended up precipitating a visit by Nicolás Maduro to the state of Zulia and the creation of a plan for its recovery. By October, according to PDVSA, 220 kilometers of pipelines had already been replaced and the company recognized that by eradicating crude oil spills, the exploitation potential of this sector of the country of some 800,000 barrels of oil per day, which currently arrives, could be exploited. to just 194,000. But the state of the industry makes its recovery a titanic task, for which the country requires an investment of billions of dollars. While they plug leaks on one side, waste tanks overflow on another. The multiplication of spills is one of the faces of the collapse of the Venezuelan oil industry and also of the country's economy.
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