Multinational oil consortium OCP Ltd. could withdraw its plans to build a heavy crude pipeline in Ecuador if the government does not approve the environmental permits it is seeking, the company’s president said Tuesday.
The government needs to approve an environmental impact report OCP prepared on its $1.1 billion project, but the Environment Ministry last week asked OCP to revise 72 aspects of its original plan.
The pipeline, which has been postponed for more than a decade, would nearly double the country’s capacity for crude transport. But environmentalists oppose the route selected for the pipeline, which would pass through the Mindo protected forest and bird habitat 16 miles northwest of Quito.
The ministry’s request is seen as a delay tactic to address these concerns.
If the consortium doesn’t receive the environmental permits to build along the preferred route, “we would be returning to the issue of whether or not to build the pipeline,” OCP President Hernan Lara said in an interview on Ecuavisa television. OCP is made up of oil companies Alberta Energy, ENI, Kerr McGee, Occidental Petroleum, Repsol-YPF, Perez Companc, and Argentine construction firm Techint.
Lara said the alternative, southern pipeline route suggested by environmentalists would cross a larger tract of primary forest – 13-19 miles – than the northern one already proposed – about 8 miles.
Energy Minister Pablo Teran recognized on Tuesday that “until the process is completed and the environmental impact study is approved, nothing is definite. If it is proven this isn’t the route with the least impact, it will have to be rejected.”
