The accident on July 2 in the vicinity of the KU-Charly platform, in the Gulf of Mexico, from which more than a third of the oil produced by the country is extracted, went around the world: a gas spill after the fracture of a pipeline 80 meters under the sea caused a spectacular “eye of fire”.
Petróleos Mexicanos (Pemex), the country’s largest state-owned company, reported that the fracture of the pipeline was the result of an intense thunderstorm and that hydrocarbons, as they migrated to the sea surface, caught fire due to electric shocks that fell into the sea. The fire consumed all the gas and the leak was repaired by sealing with nitrogen, the statement said. The company also said that the incident is already under control and the Mexican government ruled out any permanent damage to ecosystems as all the gas had been liquidated in about five hours.
Read: Pemex rules out environmental damage from fire in Campeche platform area
However, scientists and environmentalists say that, because it is a restricted area by the Mexican government, they have not had access to the site, so they have not been able to corroborate that there has indeed been no damage. In addition, experts point out that determining the impacts of an accident like this at sea is particularly difficult due to the dispersion of pollutants.
#Campeche The “eye of fire” was located 400 meters from the Ku-Charly platform, belonging to the Ku Maloob Zaap Integral Production Asset
Video: pic.twitter.com/0TONq1czOx Special
— The Universal States (@Univ_Estados) July 2, 2021
In this sense, the researcher Héctor Reyes Bonilla, from the Autonomous University of Baja California (UABC), points out that it is very difficult to be sure of the effects on ecosystems, because “the reefs are very far away; by the time you get to see what happened, the ocean has already mixed and diluted everything,” he says. The expert maintains that, for example, “the accidents of ixtoc (1979) or Deepwater Horizon (2010), in the Same Gulf of Mexico, were thousands of times greater, and yet it was difficult to find long-term ecological effects”.
What is known is that the event generated a massive emission of pollutants into the atmosphere. “The data from Copernicus (a virtual observation platform based on satellite images used by researchers) indicate a monstrous elevation of NO2 that spread to all the coastal states of that region of the country,” adds Reyes Bonilla, which, according to the expert, represents a serious public health problem that is invisible by having chronic and not acute effects.
Some 25 civil society organizations called on the government to investigate and punish the events that led to the fire and to prepare a detailed study of the impacts, as well as a plan to repair the damage.
“The value of the reefs in the Campeche Probe, where the accident occurred, is very large, it connects to other reefs in the gulf and the Caribbean Sea, so we must make evaluations and review the effect of the possible impacts,” says Lorenzo Álvarez Filip, researcher at the Academic Unit of Reef Systems of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM).
The opacity of information
Carla Aceves Ávila, PhD in environmental law from the University of Guadalajara, said that “it is striking how little technical rigor this emergency has been treated, and the obvious dissatisfation in avoiding giving a general explanation of what happened.” In addition, it adds that “the ambiguity that has been observed in the very few statements of the responsible authorities shows a great opacity and secrecy incompatible with transparency and accountability.”
But the lack of information worries the scientific community and environmentalists not only about the accident on July 2, but about the possible frequency with which “minor” incidents may be occurring with a high potential for chronic damage to the populations of more than 5 thousand marine species that inhabit the area.
The researcher Lorenzo Álvarez Filip recalls that in October 2019 there was another incident, “less spectacular, that did not fill the newspapers, but that unlike the latter, it was a spill of crude oil and those thousands of liters affected cayo Arcas”, he says. “Petroleos Mexicanos took five months to publicly acknowledge this,” the expert said. “The point is that this was very impressive and went around the world, but the chronic stress of minor incidents can be more harmful, less spectacular, but in the long run do more damage and that is what there is no timely information about,” he adds.
“It is clear that oil installations and their poor maintenance pose to the environment and to the safety of thesonas,” Greenpeace Mexico reported. However, according to a report prepared by the civil organization Cartocracia, dedicated to promoting transparency and public access to georeferenced socio-environmental information, “in Mexico there are no direct measurements of emissions in the hydrocarbons sector, there is no efficient inspection and surveillance system, and it cannot be verified that the sector’s facilities are in an adequate state.”
For the same reason, Álvarez highlights the importance of Pemex not only allowing total transparency about this type of incident, but also informing society about the resources it allocates to the maintenance of its infrastructure. Álvarez agrees with Reyes Bonilla that “there must be systematic, strategic and open monitoring,” although he adds that “there may be data, but it is not necessarily open to the public, and that must be fundamental.”
Organizations demand compliance with commitments
Activist Rodrigo Navarro, a member of the Ocean Futures Society Foundation, chaired by Jean-Michel Cousteau, says that maintaining a strong commitment to fossil fuels and looking for them more and more deep in the sea will have negative consequences for the country’s natural heritage. “It is becoming more common to do oil explorations in very deep pipelines […] the problem is that being so deep, any bad weather, which are now also more common, can cause damage to infrastructure and leaks with a very high probability of catching fire,” says Navarro.
And not only that, the expert adds, but the possibility of thousands of liters of crude oil spilling would cause “the death of the entire food chain in many square kilometers around,” he says.
Photo: Pemex
On the other hand, the activist notes that “oil exploration in the deep sea is nonsense in this era when it is a question of not living on fossil fuels.” Especially in a country that in 2019 ranked fourth in the world in sulfur dioxide emissions, according to a Greenpeace analysis based on data tracked by NASA.
On July 5, 25 environmental and human rights organizations in Mexico, led by the Mexican Alliance against Fracking, said in a joint statement to the public that the Ku-Maloob-Zaap complex, where the accident occurred, contributes about 40% of the 1.68 million barrels per day of crude oil produced by Pemex.
The organizations pointed out that, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, each barrel of oil extracted emits about 235.7 kilograms of carbon dioxide (CO2), “so this complex emits every day 158,390 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, contributing to global warming.” In fact, in 2020 the oil company’s greenhouse gas emissions increased 12.5%, according to a report by the same parastatal.
You can read the full story in Monbagay Latam
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