San Ramon – ChevronTexaco Corp. has filed a claim against former partner Petroecuador, demanding that the Ecuador-based state-owned company share expenses in a lawsuit accusing Texaco of polluting the Amazon jungle.
The San Ramon-based oil company filed the request Friday with arbitrators at the American Arbitration Association in New York, company vice president and legal adviser Ricardo Reis Veiga said.
“Based on the contract, Petroecuador has the shared obligation for … whatever damages that could come out of this lawsuit,” Reis Veiga said. “The decisions of the arbitrators cannot be appealed – they are final and obligatory.”
The ongoing lawsuit, brought by 88 people representing 30,000 poor jungle settlers and Amazon Indians, opened in a rural Ecuador court in October after spending a decade winding through U.S. courts.
The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York ruled in 2002 that the case should be heard in the country where the damage allegedly occurred.
The plaintiffs want ChevronTexaco to pay to clean up contamination and provide medical care for people harmed by pollution. They estimate the costs could reach $1 billion.
The plaintiffs allege that Texaco chose to cut costs during the 1970s and 1980s by dumping 18.5 billion gallons of oily wastewater brought up by drilling into more than 600 open pits and streams in the Amazon jungle.
The company says the lawsuit is unfounded and that it complied with a government cleanup plan. Texaco merged with Chevron in 2001.
Also Wednesday, a ChevronTexaco Corp.-led oil pipeline venture that operates in Kazakhstan and Russia said it hired a group of system design and construction companies to study a more than double expansion of the pipeline’s capacity.
The Caspian Pipeline Consortium asked Houston-based Gulf Interstate Engineering and John Brown E&C Ltd. of the U.K. to study boosting the pipe’s capacity to 67 million tons a year, equivalent to 1.4 million barrels a day, from 28 million tons, CPC said in a statement.
Chevron has invested more than $1 billion in Russia as a leader of the Caspian Pipeline Consortium, whose pipeline hauls oil from the Tengiz field in Kazakhstan to the Russian port of Novorossiysk. That link is the only privately operated crude oil export pipeline in Russia.
