RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazil’s environmental regulator refused on Wednesday to grant a license for a controversial offshore oil drilling venture close to the mouth of the Amazon River, prompting celebration from environmentalists who had warned of its potential influence.
The choice to reject the state-run oil firm Petrobras’ request to drill the FZA-M-59 block was made “as a perform of a gaggle of technical inconsistencies,” stated the company’s president, Rodrigo Agostinho, who highlighted environmental considerations.
With Brazil’s current manufacturing set to peak in coming years, Petrobras has sought to safe extra reserves off Brazil’s northern coast. The corporate earmarked nearly half its five-year, $6 billion exploration finances for the realm.
CEO Jean Paul Prates had stated that the primary properly could be momentary and that the corporate has by no means recorded a leak in offshore drilling. The corporate did not persuade the environmental company.
“There isn’t any doubt that Petrobras was supplied each alternative to treatment important factors of its venture, however that it nonetheless presents worrisome inconsistencies for the secure operation in a brand new exploratory frontier with excessive socioenvironmental vulnerability,” Agostinho wrote in his resolution.
The distinctive and biodiverse space is residence to little-studied swaths of mangroves and a coral reef, and activists and specialists had stated the venture risked leaks that might imperil the delicate atmosphere.
Eighty civil society and environmental organizations, together with WWF Brasil and Greenpeace, had referred to as for the license to be rejected pending an in-depth research.
“Agostinho is defending a nearly unknown ecosystem and maintains the coherence of the Lula authorities, which has promised in its discourse to be guided by the battle in opposition to the local weather disaster,” the Local weather Observatory, a community of environmental non-profits, stated in an announcement.
In the course of the first presidential phrases of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2003 to 2010, large offshore discoveries grew to become a method of financing well being, schooling and welfare packages. Some members of his Staff’ Celebration proceed to see oil as a method to make sure social progress.
Vitality Minister Alexandre Silveira stated in March that the realm is the “passport to the longer term” for growth in Brazil’s northern area. In his prior phrases, Lula used the identical phrase to explain the offshore oil discoveries in an space generally known as pre-salt.
However Lula has stived to display the environmental awakening he has undergone within the years since, with safety of the Amazon a fixture in his marketing campaign final yr to unseat Jair Bolsonaro and return to the presidency.
Activists and specialists had warned that approval for the offshore oil venture may threaten the pure world, but in addition dent Lula’s newfound picture as an environmental defender.
The method to acquire an environmental license for the FZA-M-59 block started in 2014, on the request of BP Vitality do Brasil. Exploration rights have been transferred to Petrobras in 2020.
Suely Araújo, a former head of the atmosphere company and now a public coverage specialist with the Local weather Observatory, stated Agostinho made the precise name not only for the precise venture, but in addition for the nation.
“The choice on this case provides trigger for a broader debate in regards to the function of oil within the nation’s future. It’s time to set up a calendar to eradicate fossil fuels and speed up the simply transition for oil exporting international locations, reminiscent of Brazil, and never open a brand new exploration frontier,” Araújo stated in an announcement. “Those that sleep as we speak dreaming of oil wealth are likely to get up tomorrow with a stranded asset, or an ecological catastrophe, or each.”
Different controversial megaprojects within the Amazon that stay on the desk embrace repaving a freeway that will slice via preserved rainforest, development of a serious railway for grain transport and renewal of a large hydroelectric dam’s license.
___
Related Press author Eléonore Hughes in Rio de Janeiro contributed to this report.